December 8, 2014

"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. No matter how the media story ends, or what we come to know, there is a reason that people believed and continue to believe Jackie: There are so many people – too many people – who report similar attacks."

Writes Jessica Valenti in this morning's Guardian.

I choose to believe because I lose nothing by doing so...

Kind of like Pascal's wager, no?

99 comments:

Anonymous said...

So, being taken in by a fraud "has no cost", so long as it's a left wing approved fraud?

Thanks, Jessica, for showign us how little you care about the truth. We'll remember it, the next time you cry wolf.

Lyssa said...

She may lose nothing by doing so. Actual rape victims, when people think of this case (among others) when they hear their stories, have plenty. But hey, as long as she doesn't personally lose anything.

Anonymous said...

"Fake but Accurate" is enough for our clerisy.

richard mcenroe said...

Jackie Valenti is free to be a credulous idiot. At the Guardian, that's a career enhancer.

She is not free to make the reputations and futures of innocent men the ante for her credulity.

richard mcenroe said...

"Jessica", not "Jackie" Valenti.

My bullshit artists are starting to run together...

Anonymous said...

This is the same woman who proudly stood with Bill Clinton in the picture made infamous by Althouse.

I haven't followed her that closely since, but did Valenti subsequently denounce Bill as a rapist, or Hillary as a rape-enabler? Was she willing to pay the cost?

Grackle said...

I choose to believe Walter Duranty. I lose nothing by doing so.

Patrick said...

The first sentence in the second paragraph is all that's needed to see this for the very little it's worth.

Let's take a closer look at those stats...

SJ said...

Except that the test for Pascal's wager happens in the afterlife (if such exists).

And that the risks of being wrong in Pascal's Wager are much different than the risks of being wrong about Jackie.

Still, both Pascal's Wager and this "choose to believe Jackie" statement are about things that are hard to prove. Both are also likely to produce lots of arguments and accusations of heresy.







Nota Bene: I have argued elsewhere on the internet that part of Jackie's story makes sense.

Let's propose that Jackie did the following:
(A) was at a party,
(B) was a participant in some sort of group-sexual activity, consensual or not,
(C) left the party location in a daze at some obscure hour between midnight and dawn,
(D) called friends for help,
(E) discussed with friends an event that she considered shameful (or potentially shameful) at that time,
(F) decided not to report anything.

If I assume that something like the above happened, it is not hard to believe the following about Jackie:
(G) was invited to meet with the Dean about her academic standings, and reported some sort of rape/sexual-assault to the Dean,
(H) chose not to pursue punishment for the alleged assault
(I) joined a support group
(J) decided to embellish her story, until it became a shocking gang-rape-as-fraternity-initiation story

This is all speculation on my part. It's possible Jackie didn't do any of (A) through (F), or only a few of them.

However, I'm pretty sure that (G) through (J) happened.

Meade said...

"I choose to believe [Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam, Jr., and Elizabeth Hubbard]. I lose nothing by doing so even if [the spectral evidence is] later proven wrong – but at least I will still be able to sleep at night for having stood by [4] young [women] who may have been through an awful trauma."

exhelodrvr1 said...

"so many people" report vicious gang rapes by 7 people?

I would be interested in seeing the data on how many similar cases are reported.

the wolf said...

There are so many people – too many people – who report similar attacks.

Once again, the error is in assuming that the questioning of one rape implies a questioning that rape exists at all. The fact that other reports exist is irrelevant to this particular story.

Beldar said...

If one's basic and abiding regard for due process, for truth, for justice, for the victims of real crimes, for the falsely-accused, is already zero, then yes:

Such a one — such a wretched, depraved excuse for a human being — loses nothing by choosing to believe a false rape claim.

Jake said...

If there are "too many people like [Jackie]" as Ms. Valenti contends, why don't we publish the stories that are true?

Scott M said...

I choose to believe Cosby because I lose nothing by doing so.

deepelemblues said...

What similar attacks have been reported?

Gang-raped by seven frat brothers in a dark room for seven hours while two more frat boys watched?

Body-slammed through a glass coffee table then raped on the shards of the glass?

How many other people have been gang-raped in fraternities bearing the nickname "Rape Factory"?

Just where are these "many other people" reporting similar attacks? Where are their reports? Could we see them, maybe? Please?

traditionalguy said...

How does one prove a negative? An alibi perhaps; you cannot be in two places at the same time.

Or a maybe the 6 other guys will testify that the whole gang was having a post rape party at the time.

sparrow said...

Admitting you don't care about the truth for selfish reasons comes at a cost to your reputation.

Shanna said...

She may lose nothing by doing so. Actual rape victims, when people think of this case (among others) when they hear their stories, have plenty. But hey, as long as she doesn't personally lose anything.

Indeed. If she actually cared about women, rather than activism, she might see that all false accusations hurt women who have actually been raped, as they are less likely to be believed and rape is already difficult enough to prove as it is.

And of course, the men have suffered from false accusations. And in this particular case, sororities were suspended as well, right? Which is a really weird thing, if you think about it, as a punishment for an alleged rape at a frat house.

Of course, I am similarly appalled at the women who jump over anyone who is trying to teach women how to protect themselves from rape as 'blaming the victim'.

Chuck said...

Good! It is truly good, to see the left wing and radical feminist press dig in on this story. The Guardian, Salon, public radio; Slate. Dig in. Keep the dispute alive. Long enough so that it remains an issue for 2016, when the Democrats' flogging of Title IX will be an even bigger issue, and when Bill Clinton's history will again be center stage.

Rush Limbaugh used a great line today; I don't know if he coined it himself... "They say that Bill Clinton was the first black President. He was really the white Bill Cosby."

bleh said...

I choose to treat accusations as accusations.

chillblaine said...

We should encourage more faithful reporting of unwanted sexual contact by women. I recommend offering women a menu like the one at Chipotle's that shows the calorie counts. The offended woman can choose the nature of unwanted contact and it shows them the potential prison term for the 'alleged perp.' "I'll have Fraternity Gang Rape with the 20 years to life, please."

Meade said...

t-man said...
"This is the same woman who proudly stood with Bill Clinton in the picture made infamous by Althouse."

She is. And Bill Clinton is the same man who proudly stood before the American people and, impeaching those who accused him of sexual harassment, said: Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.

Michael K said...

The story of this case and some other similar cases are pretty well described here and are just today's example of the war on men.

Somebody might talk to this guy about the cost.

Banks, a highly recruited star at Long Beach Poly High School more than a decade ago before a classmate accused of him rape, entered the game against Cincinnati at linebacker with about eight minutes remaining in the fourth quarter.

The Obama administration is doing to men what it uses as strategy in race.

Breaking a few eyes to make an omelet.

Shanna said...

If there are "too many people like [Jackie]" as Ms. Valenti contends, why don't we publish the stories that are true?

Ah, the million dollar question! Would anyone have commented if her story was 'I went on a date with a guy, he raped me, the end'? That is probably the most common type of campus rape.

It was the salacious details that drew in the rolling stone reporter, and also made the story less believable. I for one could not get past the idea that her friends response to a gang rape on broken glass would be anything other than 'we're going to hospital this second and calling the police on the way'. And once some of the details seem wrong, the whole thing starts to fall apart.

Michael K said...

"Breaking a few eggs !"

Damn autocorrect !

Patrick said...

SJ,I also find it believe that something bad happened to Jackie. Her story, however, was offered as an anecdote about how bad the rape culture is in colleges. Her claims that pertain to that issue are unverifiable or demonstrably wrong, except in one regard:the university's woeful and inadequate response. They were told that a fraternity engaged in planned, systematic and repeated violent gang rape, and did nothing. To fail to even investigate such a charge is inexcusable to say the least.

She may well have been raped or sexually assaulted. It is fairly clear she was not lead to the frat house by the guy she claims did it.
Both Rolling Stone and the UVA administration utterly failed to investigate this.

Tank said...

As Dennis Prager would say, clarity is good. She has made it clear that she has a narrative, an opinion, and she is not going to let the actual facts get in the way.

Clarity.

She is not alone, see: baby boy Martin, gentle giant Brown, et als. These people still talk about Zimmerman and Wilson as if no actual facts ever came out.

She is wrong about not losing anything. She has [further] lost any integrity, credibility and believability she might have had.

Lyssa said...

Chuck said: It is truly good, to see the left wing and radical feminist press dig in on this story. The Guardian, Salon, public radio; Slate.

Just because I think that credit should be given where due, I have to say that Slate has actually done a pretty good job on this one. Two of its main writers were among the earlier parties asking questions on it.

Original Mike said...

"Kind of like Pascal's wager, no?"

Even as a child I thought, "that ain't going to work".

Scott M said...

One recent paper that does make that comparison, “Violence Against College Women” by Callie Marie Rennison and Lynn Addington, compares the crime experienced by college students and their peers who are not in college, using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. What the researchers found was the opposite of what Gillibrand says about the dangers of campuses: “Non-student females are victims of violence at rates 1.7 times greater than are college females,” the authors wrote, and this greater victimization holds true for sex crimes: “Even if the definition of violence were limited to sexual assaults, these crimes are more pervasive for young adult women who are not in college.”

If we accept the 1 in 5 rape stat on college campuses, apparently the safest thing to do for a woman 18-24 is to go to college.

MadisonMan said...

When you're heavily invested in the Rape Outrage Industry, of course you will believe Jackie.

lgv said...

Wow. I would have never thought of that analogy. Very good.

Pascal is looking down at you from heaven with a wry smile......or not.

Henry said...

The real malevolent twist to Jessica Valenti's statement of faith is not the literal truth of her assertion. She does, indeed, lose nothing by believing Jackie, emotionally, financially, or socially. And why should she?

But Valenti's belief does not require that she smear the motives of those that have doubts. And yet that is the use to which she puts it.

At least she will still able to sleep at night.

Shanna said...

except in one regard:the university's woeful and inadequate response. They were told that a fraternity engaged in planned, systematic and repeated violent gang rape, and did nothing. To fail to even investigate such a charge is inexcusable to say the least.

My question though is that I don't think we know what she actually told the university. Did all that systematic frat gang rape enter in? And what is the university supposed to do if she refuses to file a report or go to the police? Honestly, I thought the university response on an individual assault victim level seemed fairly reasonable. They told her her options, and let her make the decision as an adult.

Of course, if she hadn't gone to them a long while after the assault actually happened, they would have had more to go on. Like actual evidence, potentially.

Krumhorn said...

I choose to believe Ruby Bates and Victoria Price. I lose nothing by doing so, even though they later recanted – but at least I will have been able to sleep at night for having stood by two young women who asserted they had been through an awful trauma.

- Krumhorn

walter said...

Author pulls in a quote:

"As Julia Horowitz, an editor at UVA’s student newspaper, wrote at Politico: What does it say that we read an article in which an 18-year-old girl was pinned down, graphically violated by multiple people in a house we pass almost every day – and we thought, ‘That just may be right?’

Well..it could be saying any number of things..

Anonymous said...

Patrick,

How do we know whether UVA's response was reasonable or not, if we don't know the truth of the underlying incident? How do we know what, exactly, Jackie reported, or whether she was remotely credible in describing her experience? The university supposedly offered to either report her claims to the police, or to conduct an internal investigation, and she declined both options.

If someone came to you with a horrible, but borderline fantastic story years after the alleged incident, and then declined offers to investigate, what would you do? I believe that, despite her obvious distress, UVA could not contact her family for assistance due to federal privacy legislation.

buwaya said...

She does not lose anything of course. She is writing for her audience inside her bubble. Whatever her goals and interests are, we do know that they only exist inside her bubble. She knows who she needs to satisfy and it isn't the rest of us.

Greg Hlatky said...

I choose to believe Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broddrick and Paula Jones. I lose nothing by doing so.

The Drill SGT said...

here’s not a lot we know about Jackie, not really. She’s a third-year student at the University of Virginia who says that, when she was 18 and in her first year of college, she was raped by a group of fraternity men. She didn’t report the attack to the police or the school, instead confiding – a full, pained two years later – to the members of a student-run support group for sexual assault survivors (and then, after that, to Sabrina Rubin Erdely of Rolling Stone magazine).

Jessica, like most Feminist Survivor support group types leaves out facts when they don't fit the meme.

1. The three contemporaneous friends sometimes are advantageous to the story telling and sometimes when what Jackie said two years ago, doesn't match the story today, much less the RS version they get left out.

2. The fact that she told the UVA a different story a year ago, gets left out.

3. that her story with the rape support group keeps changing gets left out.

No wonder she doesn't want to be a witness or even the heroine in a RS story.

PS: yes SJ, I do think there is some kernel of truth in there, but I'd change in (E) 'shameful' to 'regrets', and in (B) drop 'group'

It might have been both a group and a non-consent event, but given all the other moving parts in her story, the common thread for me is 'sexual encounter she seriously regrets'



Tank said...

Greg Hlatky said...

I choose to believe Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broddrick and Paula Jones. I lose nothing by doing so.

Jones actually sued and was paid almost a million dollars.

jr565 said...

This woman's reaction is the black community's reaction to any shooting or incident involving a white cop and a black suspect. They choose to believe becauee it happens a lot.

SJ said...

@Patrick,

it is possible that Jackie told the full gang-rape story to the Dean.

Or possible that she told some other story of criminal sexual assault.

And I doubt that the Dean wants to come out with his own notes from a private meeting with Jackie about academic performance. (The Dean doesn't want to run afoul of FERPA.)

garage mahal said...

I believe Selene Waters when she claimed Ronald Reagan raped here. I lose nothing by doing so.

"I opened the door," Walters told the magazine. "Then it was the battle of the couch. I was fighting him. I didn't want him to make love to me. He's a very big man, and he just had his way. Date rape? No, God, no, that's [Kelley's] phrase. I didn't have a chance to have a date with him."

exhelodrvr1 said...

So 35% of all 18-24ish non-student females are victims of violent sexual assaults? Where is Eric Holder and the DOJ? Shouldn't that be their top priority?

jr565 said...

SH loses nothing by believing. The guy who goes to jail for rape or gets ostracized for being a rapist might lose something though.

traditionalguy said...

Atheists burn and Pascal laughs. He was not the one too dumb to receive a free gift.

Hammond X. Gritzkofe said...

"I choose to believe ..."

Oh, sorry. I thought we were back on the Peter Pan thread.

Patrick said...

T man, I wasn't clear enough, but the RS article said the UVA admin had a very blase approach. In the fave of such charges,much more was warranted. Of course, that came from the RS article, so yes, skepticism is warranted.

Abdul Abulbul Amir said...


Well there many people who are desperate to believe these stories. There people who are more than willing to provide the desperate what they crave.

Matt Sablan said...

UVA has to have a blase approach. Working as an RA I got ridiculous stories [my favorite: "A midget is running naked through the halls!"]

As far as UVA was concerned, this was a potential terrible thing that... the victim doesn't want us to look into. OK. Done and done. If they look into it and find the Rape fraternity, then what? They've got no victim; no crime to charge them with. All they'll do is waste resources. And if the woman is LYING to them, they're in an even worse spot.

If she doesn't want it investigated, it doesn't get investigated.

etbass said...

This all confirms an opinion I have held for a long time; that with liberals, truth is not an inherently desirable thing. Achieving their goals are the important thing and whether truth inures, matters not.

Peter said...

Sort of like the way people chose to "believe the children" when adults were accused of fantastic crimes against children. And the "recovered memory" movement.

Believe the Children, Believe the Women, whatever. Just Believe.

Perhaps not all that different from applying Pascal's Wager to Tailgunner Joe McCarthy's accusations regarding communists?


After all, an accusation might be true (and even if it isn't, others somewhat like it are).

Shanna said...

As far as UVA was concerned, this was a potential terrible thing that... the victim doesn't want us to look into. OK. Done and done.

Honestly, they said 'Do you want to go to the police?'. Do you want to handle it in house and here are the details for that. Or do you just want to confront the person who wronged you with counselors available (or whatever that third option was).

I suppose they could have just pointed her towards the police station and had no other option, but even RS admits one of the options is mandated by law through what Title 9? If she didn't want to press charges, the school can't make her and she reported this too late to get any real evidence. So what exactly were they supposed to do here?

Steve M. Galbraith said...

This fanaticism, this rejection of reality is a bit scary.

I don't want to counter exaggeration with exaggeration but this is a level of fanaticism that is worrisome.

Or should be.

iowan2 said...

I choose to believe that Jessica Valenti and the Gardian will continue to print lies to advance a radical destructive agenda. It has been proven right by history, and now explained in print.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Matthew Sablan said...

If she doesn't want it investigated, it doesn't get investigated.

Shanna said...

So what exactly were they supposed to do here?

I suspect she wanted them to skip the investigation ( and trial ) and proceed with the sentencing.

Drago said...

garage mahal said...
I believe Selene Waters when she claimed Ronald Reagan raped here. I lose nothing by doing so.

Very true since you start with zero credibility.

Keep running with that though.

etbass said...

They (liberals) are steeped in the worldview that morality is a relative thing and it is only a small step to accept that truth itself is a relative thing.

Normal people are total shocked to see this demonstrated but the liberals just go right on with it, shamelessly. And so many of them are quite intelligent and super educated.

Browndog said...

sparrow said...

Admitting you don't care about the truth for selfish reasons comes at a cost to your reputation.


I'd say self-esteem and self respect are the greater costs.

Then again, to say you'd lose nothing indicates a certain level of honesty as to where you currently stand in that regard.

Scott M said...

"I choose to believe. I lose nothing by doing so.

Is this the sort of cognitive dissonance that allows seemingly intelligent people like Sean Penn and Danny Glover fall in love with the likes of Hugo Chavez?

HoodlumDoodlum said...

Condoleezza Rice, Judith Miller, and Colin Powell are all people. I'm sure Valenti choose to believe them--she lost nothing by doing so and there were so many--too many--people who reported similar things.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

The amazing part of this is the larger pattern: these advocates are announcing quite clearly that they have an almost unbelievably low standard for credulity in cases that will advance their cause, and then call the failure of others to adopt their incredibly low standard evidence of a rape culture or some other thing they're fighting against.

1. "I believe any woman automatically, no matter what."
2. "It's outrageous that you're asking questions or affording the accused basic due process protections (in the legal and moral sense) in the face of this accusation I've chosen to automatically believe without question.
3. "The actual truth or falsity of the accusation notwithstanding, your reluctance to instantly agree with me is clear evidence of a rape culture and is in fact its own crime against women. You must repent and I must be given more influence (and money for my organization, etc)."

Were the subject at hand not violence against women, would this fly with anyone for even a second? Is that not in itself sexist (we afford this ridiculous "argument" consideration only because of the greater care we have for women's health/safety)?

HoodlumDoodlum said...

By the way, it's significantly worse than Paschal's Wager--Paschal was speaking for himself; Valenti is both stating her personal decision and advocating for institutional changes to force adoption of that position by others. It's more equivalent to Paschal arguing that on the basis of his belief everyone should be compelled to attend church services, etc.

Michael K said...

Isn't it interesting that the political left invests in these witch trial-type fantasy stories.

Recovered Memories.

Satanic Ritual Child abuse.

OK, that one may be bipartisan.

Daycare child abuse.

That last one came as a result of an Al Gore bill that funded research in child abuse when he was a Senator.

Birkel said...

I will break out the old standard:
The Left cares only about power.

Truth is absent in these things. These things are about power. Therefore, believing they should wield power, truth becomes a casualty. Very rare to see a Leftist explicitly acknowledge that truth is unimportant in their analysis. So at least there is value in clarity.

Bill said...

Thank you for keeping us abreast of Jessica's latest codswallop.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

It seems pretty clear the Left and the Academy (do I repeat myself?) are doing their best to train young people to Valenti's way of thinking.
Imagine yourself in a courtroom, as a defendant or the family member of a defendant--maybe just as a witness, etc. How many lil' Valenti's are there on that jury, do you think? You know if you fit a certain--let's call it profile--you shouldn't expect to get a fair hearing in the court of public opinion, controlled as it is by the Left (through the Media). At what point does that extend into the actual courtroom?

Amanda Marcotte called people who defended the Duke lacrosse team (who were, it turns out, not guilty) "rape loving scum." She was later given a position in Sen Edwards' Presidential campaign. Was Marcotte disowned by Feminists generally? Was her influence in the culture at large appreciably diminished?

Dr Weevil said...

I agree with Beldar and others that Jessica Valenti and garage mahal both have "nothing to lose". I just wanted to mention that they remind me of the knight in As You Like It I.2 who "swore by his honour they were good pancakes, and swore by his honour the mustard was naught", though in fact, "the pancakes were naught and the mustard was good, and yet was not the knight forsworn", because (as Touchstone explains), "if you swear by that that is not, you are not forsworn: no more was this knight, swearing by his honour, for he never had any; or if he had, he had sworn it away before ever he saw those pancakes or that mustard."

Anyone who lives near D.C. has less than a week to see the Shakespeare Theatre of D.C. production.

Jupiter said...

The irony is that many, perhaps most, rape allegations are taken very seriously. I believed Clinton's accusers, and I believe Cosby's accusers, because a) they are numerous, and b) they are credible. In this case, it was that nonsense about "If you go to the hospital, none of us will ever drink again" that made my BS detector go off. And once I started pondering the allegations, they were flatly absurd.

Steven said...

There were so many — too many — Southern white women reporting rapes by black men, 1865-1965, too. And there was nothing to be lost by believing the accusers then, either.

Krumhorn said...

I choose to believe Jackie. I lose nothing by doing so, even if I’m later proven wrong, because it's a metaphor.

- Krumhorn

Jupiter said...

Actually, there have been some credible accusations of gang rape on campus lately. The problem, from the Leftist point of view, is that the accused are not white frat boys.



Steve Sailer has a roundup;
http://tinyurl.com/q8fseet

tim in vermont said...

It is pure politics. "You are never going to tear down the master's house with the master's tools." That's why they don't care about Juanita Broaddrick, the cause is more important than the individual, and the cause includes Hillary.

kcom said...

I have to say it always struck me as implausible that women on college campuses were at greater risk of sexual assault than the female population at large in the same age group. It really doesn't pass the smell test. All you have to do is spend a bit of time in the real world, and watch a few episodes of "Cops" and similar shows, to see the number of women living outside the cossetted confines of a college campus and the risks they live with. What percentage of college women are meth addicts? What percentage are prostitutes? What percentage live in crime ridden neighborhoods where it's risky to even be on the street (watch "The First 48" for that one). The idea that college women who are coddled in a college "community" (also true of college men) are at greater risk than those in the general community with a much higher percentage living much closer to the mean streets with no community to look after them is just hard to believe. In fact, I don't believe it.

ddh said...

At least Jessica Valenti will still be able to sleep at night for having stood by a young woman who may have been through an awful trauma. The Scottsboro boys will rest easy knowing that.

Brando said...

Valenti has nothing to lose because she never had credibility to begin with. Why not just keep going full retard until the last dead ender SJWs can all fit in one room?

tim in vermont said...

Pascal's wager is pure BS anyway. If you act as if it were true and he is wrong, you have thrown away the only true self you will ever have in the whole scope of the universe for a lie.

mtrobertsattorney said...

Jessica knows that there is no evidence of any kind whatsoever that would cause her to disbelieve Jackie.

So she is quite logical when she says she risks nothing by believing Jackie.

tim in vermont said...

Oh, and hey look Lena made it all up too.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

It's funny about the Scottsboro boys, isn't it? Almost as though some activists are determined to forget that not every rape accusation is necessarily true.

Of course, we'll soon get the amended version, which is that rape accusations are invariably true, except when pressed by white women against black men. Problem solved, more or less.

Uncle Pavian said...

I still haven't seen anything that persuades me that "Jackie" is even a real person.

Michael said...

Man, these women are sad there aren't more rapes. Devastated. Here they are, the rapes, everywhere and yet not enough of them are reported or even true. It is terrible. Sad.

How about going to the police? How about not letting a bunch of fucking academics decide how the horrible crime, CRIME, against you will be adjudicated.

Jackie is what is known as a nut case, a person desperately in need of attention and one who has found the mother lode of attention getting in a gang rape story. A fraternity gang rape story. One embellished with pile after pile of utter bullshit.

My money is on the nothing happened to Jackie.

Krumhorn said...

There is considerable leftie outrage following yesterday's broadcast of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom

As reported today:

One scene in particular — in which Don Keefer (Thomas Sadoski) tells a Princeton student who claims she was raped that, as a journalist, he is “morally obligated” to believe her alleged attacker’s innocence until the man is proven guilty — had critics flinging themselves on their crunchy chairs and gnawing at the cushions in an ecstasy of outrage. (emphasis supplied).

It's utterly appalling how willing the lefties are to accept the disgrace, humiliation and damage to a young man's life that is the inevitable fallout from a claim of rape or sexual misconduct that hasn't yet been proven, or worse...is false.

We live in very strange and dangerous times.

- Krumhorn

n.n said...

Valenti loses nothing. The defamation of male character progresses. Or Valenti suffers self-defamation, because rational and reasonable people do not tolerate random acts of prejudice -- the degenerate religion.

tim in vermont said...

@Krumhorn

This is all about overthrowing the moral precept of "innocent until proven guilty" even though precepts like that, enshrined in the Magna Carta 799 years ago, have lifted us from rule by tribal warlords to democracy as we know it today.

The young men as you call them, are enemy others. Any harm that befalls them, they deserve. This is their worldview.

ken in tx said...

I was once at an all weekend party where a guy was pressuring a girl for sex. He eventually got it in a closet, no less. Afterward she was crying. I thought he was a jerk. I also thought she was stupid. What was she thinking? Did she think someone else should should protect her from her own stupidity? Why did she go in there with him?

chickelit said...

I choose to believe because I lose nothing by doing so...

She can write that only because she has already dehumanized the innocent until proven guilty accused.

Valenti is indistinguishable from a lynch mob.

Darleen said...

Jessica *feels* this is all about her feelings and tell us it helps to make her sleep well at night.

SUCH a special snowflake.

Has anyone ever passed her the name Brian Banks?

Revenant said...

There are so many people – too many people – who report similar attacks."

What lousy luck that Rolling Stone reporter had. Out of all the "many" organized bloody college gang rapes, she stumbled onto the ONE that turned out to be complete bullshit.

Browndog said...

Any word yet on the scientific study that proves homosexual males do not have the "rape gene"?

Laika's Last Woof said...

I'm thinking of another Frenchman named Robespierre. Surely when he looked in the mirror he saw a Jacobin practicing Jacobinism in its final evolution.

Jessica, by contrast, is a feminist.

JAORE said...

"I choose to believe because I lose nothing by doing so..."

In a right and just world you would, dear, you would.

Quaestor said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Quaestor said...

traditional guy wrote: Atheists burn and Pascal laughs. He was not the one too dumb to receive a free gift.

Leave it to traditional guy to... Sheesh, you must have a problem child, trad guy.

Jon Burack said...

I haven't looked through all the comments here, but I do not see this idea. "I choose to believe," is not the same as saying "I believe." I think this applies to Pascal as well. It is a ruse. If you really do believe, you do not do so out of choice, but out of a necessity the facts of the situation force upon you. This woman's claim is actually an admission of doubt, not belief. She really does not believe, but she denies it perhaps because by admitting it she would lose something.

Fernandinande said...

"I lose nothing ..."

Not confused by facts.

At least I will still be able to sleep at night for not having stood by a young woman who told a bunch of lies.

Brando said...

I will say this much for Valenti--there's something refreshing in her honesty. She is openly admitting that she is a moral monster, who "chooses to believe" someone regardless of any facts or evidence. She is a part of a strain of SJW that has turned their political beliefs into a form of religion, where faith reigns and facts mean nothing if they run against the narrative. Some SJWs will never admit to thinking like this, even though they do. But when someone like Valenti is open about the limits of her mind, the reader can say "thanks, now I can pretty much write off anything else you have to say."