But Seriously...

I must say though, this is going to be a shot in the arm for business to want to come back to America with lower taxes and bringing foreign income home finally. This could mean a lot of jobs which is the biggest problem with this country.......If you discount the impact of this tax cut on the deficit. That is a whole different discussion though. I would assume spending cuts are going to have to accompany this tax cut.

 

Our legal system is set up to require a preponderance of evidence when it comes to meting out punishments. There is zero chance that a recollection with no corroboration would meet that standard, nor should it. However, that has nothing to do with the way people react to a person, or whether they want to work with him in the future.

As far as imagining being falsely accused of something, I have. A lot. I'd elaborate, but I'd hate to be accused to racializing this issue.

There is a world of difference between saying that somebody should go to jail, and exposing their behavior so that other people can make informed decisions. Relying on the court system to get it right every time in cases of sexual assault, before people can form opinions is naive.

Let's be clear about something -- the media didn't crucify Kevin Spacey because of a single story somebody told about an event that happened 30 years ago. They crucified him because he has a clear pattern of predatory behavior. That was covered up by his agency, his management, and multiple studios. That he couldn't even muster up a specific denial is incredibly telling here. If anything, it should have happened sooner.

False accusations are a problem, no doubt. But not only are they rare, they are particularly rare when it comes to socially powerful people. The idea that a single false accusation could ruin the life of somebody on the level of Weinstein or Spacey is complete fantasy, and I defy you to find a single time that it's happened.

If ten kids come out and say Dan Schneider abused them, but there isn't sufficient evidence to convict him in a court of law, you still think he should be high up at Nick? Because I certainly don't.

 

But if a person isn't famous, there really isn't a social media pile-on. And in fact, most of the time, the accuser gets way more of a pile-on than the accused.

There's a wide range of things that can be considered inappropriate, and we should give people credit for differentiating once they've heard the facts. Is Bush the same as Weinstein? No, not even close. But is it the kinda shit that should be called out? I think so.

 

How is it ironic?

Also, the examples you are citing are notably different from what we are discussing here. Namely, the idea that a woman falsely accuses a man of sexual assault on social media, and then that man's entire life is ruined due solely to that allegation.

The idea that the above situation is some sort of rampant issue is completely counterfactual. Time and time again, people who say "this guy assaulted me" face way more abuse than the person doing the assaulting. And those claims are false in an overwhelming minority of cases. Has it ever happened? Probably, at some point. But those instances are tiny, TINY, in comparison to the number of guys who get away with sexual assault in one form or another.

This is nothing like the Boston Marathon bombers. This is people talking about things that *actually happened to them.* Read the posts I was replying to -- we were very specifically talking about sexual harrassment and assault, and the victims of those things sharing their stories.

 

Is there another way of reading this? Because what I think you just said was really fucked up.

Also, for what it's worth, I have known the film industry to gossip about Spacey for *years.* This isn't remotely shocking to anyone who has been paying attention. He's notorious for preying on male children. Even if he hasn't been convicted in a court of law, I would really like for that information to spread like wildfire so any parent/guardian can make appropriate choices when a huge star like Spacey wants to take their son to meet a casting director.

 

Willful misreading of my point. I am saying that people, lying or not, are sharing personal anecdotes. Not wild speculation. You want a demarcating line? There it is. People should be allowed to discuss things that have happened to them.

Glad you brought this up. This was one extremely high profile case. Are the lives of the accused ruined? I don't believe so. A shitty person did a shitty thing to them, and they suffered for it. She should be punished for it, but that hardly makes it an epidemic.

Excellent. Let's go into the numbers, shall we?

At the high end, let's take your 8 percent figure at face value. Then let's consider that the vast majority of assaults aren't reported to the police -- just 5 to 20 percent, per the experts cited in the WaPo article. Then let's also consider that getting a conviction is incredibly rare, particularly if you are white, wealthy and famous. All of that added up means that "According to the National Registry of Exonerations, since records began in 1989, in the US there are only 52 cases where men convicted of sexual assault were exonerated because it turned out they were falsely accused."

That's less than 10% of the people who have been exonerated for murder, and I don't hear anybody talking about the scourge of "fake murder accusers."

Let's drill down a little bit further: "In every academic study, one of the most common kinds of false accuser is a teenage girl who tells her parents she was raped to avoid getting in trouble. Unwanted pregnancy is sometimes cited by such girls, but the reason can also be trivial; the phrase “missed curfew” shows up with disturbing frequency in these cases As a rule, it’s the parents who insist on getting police involved. Two different have found that almost half of all false rape complaints are lodged by someone other than the alleged victim, usually a parent."

So what do all of these figures mean? They mean that the odds of a woman going on social media and simply lying about a dude pale in comparison to the odds that he did it. Occam's Razor, Bayes Theorem, Common Sense -- whatever justification you'd like to use, there isn't really a good reason *not* to have a default of believing that somebody is being truthful about their experience of sexual assault. Does that mean that I want the dude thrown in jail or fired just because somebody wrote something on social media? Absolutely not. But it does mean that my default response is "I believe you."

And if you can read statistics, which I'd think you can, it should be yours too.

And that's just for a single accuser. When you add in multiple accusers, the odds of complete innocence absolutely skyrocket.

What does piling on mean? If it means saying, "hey Sarah, I believe you when you say you were assaulted by this dude," consider me a fucktard. If it means me coming to the conclusion that Kevin Spacey is a predator based on the available evidence, consider me a fucktard. If it means pushing for an environment where more women feel comfortable outing creepy dudes and protecting each other in the process, well, fucktarded as charged.

 

Actually, that's not the high end. The high end is in the mid 40s. The low end dips under 8. The conviction rate requires a quite high burden of proof, and most studies take quite a high burden of proof to label an accusation as 'false'. There is a huge range of unknown, unless we're supposed to label cases lacking an admission of guilt from one of the victims/accused as false or true. I don't think anyone being intellectually honest can give anything other than a substantially wide range as to what percentage is true or false.

I feel like people are arguing two different things. The flurry of Hollywood cases over the last month are atypical. You have a few celebrities with accusers numbering in the dozens essentially not even denying the charges, so yeah, they're being flayed in the public square, while people in power, whether they be celebrities, hideously rich, star athletes, politicians, etc are notoriously successful at sweeping crimes under the rug or getting off with a slap on the wrist. Sure, let's isolate that and say it's good that justice is taking its course.

However, the media loves a good raping, no need to be famous. The UVA students weren't famous, Brian banks wasn't famous, the duke students, Paul Nungesser, those involved at Steubenville, or Stanford, etc etc. My question is what help is it to anyone making such a public spectacle out of these incidents? If it's supposed to encourage more women to come forward and report cases, I would argue it has the opposite effect. How does having a case dragged through the public eye encourage reporting? Most cases won't have someone dead to rights like Weinstein. When the accusations are false, if can be proven to be so, the accused usually picks up the pieces and can at some point move on, after several months or years of damage. If the ambiguity is unresolved at the end of the storm, which is fairly often, I don't see what the public eye accomplishes at all. I get the visceral reaction to heinous crimes, I do, but why do people need to be so deeply emotionally invested at all in these cases that don't pertain to them? Because everyone has known a creeper, or because if we didn't all squawk over them people wouldn't know rape is a thing? Or what?

 

Dude, did you even read the rest of the entry? I was going to go on a whole thing about how false accusation statistics can be really faulty but turns out most of it was all right there in the rest of the page:

“
A 2006 paper by Philip N.S. Rumney in the Cambridge Law Journal offers a review of studies of false reporting in the US, New Zealand and the UK.[5] Rumney draws two conclusions from his review of literature. First, the police continue to misapply the "no-crime" or "unfounding" criteria. Studies by Kelly et al. (2005), Lea et al. (2003), HMCPSI/HMIC (2002), Harris and Grace (1999), Smith (1989), and others found that police decisions to no-crime were frequently dubious and based entirely on the officer's personal judgment. Rumney notes that some officers seem to "have fixed views and expectations about how genuine rape victims should react to their victimization". He adds that "qualitative research also suggests that some officers continue to exhibit an unjustified scepticism of rape complainants, while others interpret such things as lack of evidence or complaint withdrawal as 'proof' of a false allegation".

Rumney's second conclusion is that it is impossible to "discern with any degree of certainty the actual rate of false allegations" because many of the studies of false allegations have adopted unreliable or untested research methodologies. He argues, for instance, that in addition to their small sample size, the studies by Maclean (1979) and Stewart (1981) used questionable criteria to judge an allegation to be false. MacLean deemed reports "false" if, for instance, the victim did not appear "dishevelled" and Stewart, in one instance, considered a case disproved, stating that "it was totally impossible to have removed her extremely tight undergarments from her extremely large body against her will".[16]


“The study was based on 2,643 sexual assault cases (Kelly, Lovett, and Regan, 2005). Of these, police departments classified 8% as false reports.[17]

The researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators and were made in violation of official criteria for establishing a false allegation. Closer analysis of this category applying the Home Office counting rules for establishing a false allegation and excluding cases where the application of the cases where confirmation of the designation was uncertain reduced the percentage of false reports to 3%. The researchers concluded that "one cannot take all police designations at face value" and that "[t]here is an over-estimation of the scale of false allegations by both police officers and prosecutors."


“The interviews with police officers and complainants' responses show that despite the focus on victim care, a culture of suspicion remains within the police, even amongst some of those who are specialists in rape investigations. There is also a tendency to conflate false allegations with retractions and withdrawals, as if in all such cases no sexual assault occurred. This reproduces an investigative culture in which elements that might permit a designation of a false complaint are emphasised (later sections reveal how this also feeds into withdrawals and designation of 'insufficient evidence'), at the expense of a careful investigation, in which the evidence collected is evaluated.[17][18][19]”

And about the specific FBI 8% figure:

“This estimate, however, does not appear in subsequent FBI reports.[22][23][24] This estimate was criticised as meaningless by academic Bruce Gross:

Many of the jurisdictions from which the FBI collects data on crime use different definitions of, or criteria for, "unfounded." That is, a report of rape might be classified as unfounded (rather than as forcible rape) if the alleged victim did not try to fight off the suspect, if the alleged perpetrator did not use physical force or a weapon of some sort, if the alleged victim did not sustain any physical injuries, or if the alleged victim and the accused had a prior sexual relationship. Similarly, a report might be deemed unfounded if there is no physical evidence or too many inconsistencies between the accuser's statement and what evidence does exist. As such, although some unfounded cases of rape may be false or fabricated, not all unfounded cases are false.[2]”

 

Also, speaking of false accusations versus not, this is something I’ve been wondering throughout this whole thing. I can’t remember the last, if any, high profile case of rape/assault accusation that was as widely believed and condemned as Weinstein’s. There have been a couple gross comments here and there, but for the most part it seems like people are on board. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that makes it so, but everything I can think of applies to other cases that either have more mixed reactions or are overwhelmingly mistrusted. Does anyone have any thoughts on why?

 

Somebody intelligently posted earlier about how we like to see the mighty fall.

Weinstein’s case is widely against him because it’s not just that he’s an asshole, he’s the biggest asshole in the entire universe. This guy’s public, outspoken disposition could gag a Turkish pimp from fifty yards away so I can’t imagine what gore-drenched skeletons are in the closet of the Slime De La Slime. He used to throw phones at his secretary’s heads. He uses Mafia-level strong arm tactics on both employees and rivals. People want to see him fry so bad they can taste it in their spit.

Other high-profile accusations had less appeal to seeing the accused burn. With less bias majority, people want to hear from both sides more. And with doubt came looking into particular cases with inconsistencies, holes, or flat-out lies. First up there was Gomeshi.... which threw everyone for a loop because he was our sexy, smooth nation radio guy. Mr. Soft. Now that guy has fucking issues that need working out, and needs some serious lessons in rough sex but as we know, not a rapist. Other categories like recent high-profile campus rape incidents (Duke, UVA, Mattress Girl) had holes right from the start, so they had doubt from the start. Brock Turner was dead to rights, the only one backing him are attention-whoring “shock” fuckheads like Vox Day.