Rape Accusations, Leftists, Blurred Lines, and poor Brett Kavanaugh

Once Orwellian Leftists got their hands on it, “rape” as traditionally understood became a malleable concept to be used to destroy political enemies.

Rape Pulp Magazine coversItem: Former Vice President Joe “Creepy Touch” Biden, when announcing that the Obama White House was creating a task force to address campus rape, stated “One in five of every one of those young women who is dropped off for that first day of school, before they finish school, will be assaulted in her college years.”

In fact, that statistic goes far beyond being a lie or a damn lie. It’s a complete fraud. This video soundly debunks that statistic:

Here’s the key takeaway:

[That “statistic”] comes from a study conducted over the internet at two large universities one in the Midwest and one in the South. The survey was anonymous no one’s claims were verified and terms were not clearly defined. In round numbers, a total of 5,000 women participated. Based on their responses, the authors, not the participants, determined that 1,000 had been victims of some type of non-consensual or unwanted sexual contact and — voila! — from one vaguely worded unscientific survey we suddenly arrived at a rape culture on college campuses. Tellingly, the study authors have since explicitly stated that it’s inappropriate to use their survey to make that claim. Much more comprehensive data from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics or “BJS” estimates that about one in 52.6 college women will be victims [sic] of rape or sexual assault over the course of four years. That’s far too many, but it’s a long way from one in five. The same BJS data also reveal that women in college are safer from rape than college aged women who are not enrolled in college — but the truth doesn’t serve the purposes of feminist activists or vote seeking politicians. Lies work much better and the one in five claim is tantamount to a lie.

Let me say it again: the notion of a campus “rape culture” is a grotesque lie, based on a manifestly flawed study, that the Left peddles because it allow them to control young women and destroy young men. As Glenn Reynolds likes to point out, no sentient adult actually believes this statistic because no loving parent would ever allow his or her child to go to a place that has a rate rape comparable to the rate in South Africa, one of the most sexually violent countries in the world. The only ones who believe these statistics are college administrators and the terrified female students brought to heel by these statistical lies.

For those unclear on why I added “Creepy Touch” to Biden’s name, this video helps explain:

Item: According to Time, a once reputable magazine, a Pentagon study claims that, at some military installations, more than 500 women, and quite a few men, are sexually assaulted every year:

A newly released Pentagon study revealed that many sexual assaults in the U.S. military occur across the globe at a relatively small number of bases and naval ships, including some installations where more than 500 incidents occurred in a single year.

The 119-page study, conducted by Rand Corporation, surveyed American service members to uncover where troops were most at risk of sexual assault and harassment. In many cases, installations with large populations of younger, single, and more-junior-ranking service members had a greater probability of these incidents occurring.

“Each service member’s estimated risk of being sexually assaulted in the next year depends, to a surprising extent, on his or her duty assignment to a particular unit, command, and installation,” the study said.

[snip]

Rand said more than 1700,000 active duty service and Coast Guard members completed an online sexual assault and sexual harassment survey fielded in August and September 2014. More than 560,000 were invited to participate. [The actual number is 170,000 not, as Times’ typo implies, 1,700,000.]

[snip]

A total of 6,769 men and women reported assaults in the year that ended Sept. 30, up from 6,172 a year earlier. The reports came in from uniformed service members and civilian workers. It was the highest number of reported assaults since at least 2006, the last year the Pentagon has available on the data.

There are a few points to be made based upon the above.

First, assuming all those sexual assaults are rapes (which they are not), the U.S. military, made up of young men and young women in the prime of their sexual life, has a rape rate that’s lower than 4%. Keep in mind, please, that we’re repeatedly told that America’s college campuses have a rape rate of 20% to 25%. Parents, if you want to keep your young’uns safe, send them to the military, not to college.

Second, back during WWII, when women were mobilized for the war, men and women were kept strictly segregated and chaperoned. The people in charge might have had Victorian minds (like sinks, you know), but they certainly understood that, if you want to prevent rape, you don’t mix and mingle the sexes, especially when it comes to bedrooms and bathrooms.

Third, if you read the entire Time article, you’ll note something interesting — it never once defines what constitutes “sexual assault.” Only near the end does one learn that the number of “sexual assaults” claims includes everything from sexual harassment to actual rape. Depending on how a respondent to the survey defines harassment, that’s like saying that the military is filled with terribly ill people, provided that one includes in the data set of illness everything from hangnails to cancer.

Because the Time article was silent about what constituted sexual assault, I went to the Rand report itself. I plowed through pages of densely written information about different bases and zip codes, different branches of the military, and all sorts of other survey methodology (including calculus formulas) and discovered that the official report never once defines what constitutes either sexual assault or sexual harassment.

I finally did track down a 2014 Rand Study on “sexual assault and sexual harassment in the U.S. Military” and got a chance to see one of the surveys used in the most recent survey (which is primarily aimed at tracking the geographic places in which assault and harassment are most likely to happen).

It’s instructive to see that the 2014 survey does not ask whether people were raped — that is, whether they were sexually penetrated, had oral sex performed on them, or were forced to perform sexual acts on another, in each case against their will. Instead, the survey jumbles together everything from off-color jokes to touches on non-sexual parts of the body (arms, hands), to touches on sexual parts of the body, to out-and-out rape and is equally interested in people’s emotional responses to things, including things that my generation would have laughed off or ignored.

I’ve embedded the Rand document immediately below, and you can see the questions beginning at 117 of the survey (or 137 of the Scribd document):

Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military by Sunny Bookie Berman on Scribd

Item: Going back to the first Rand study I mentioned above, the one referenced in the Time article, the Rand study states at page 26 (if one counts the cover page as “page 1”), that “sexual assault is known to be substantially underreported, and more so for men than women.”

I’ll ask here the same question I always ask when I see that statement (and I see it everywhere): I accept as true that rape, especially when men are raped, is underreported — but if it’s not being reported, how in the world do we know the factor by which it is underreported?

I’m sure some of you reading my question will happily throw at me theories about statistical extrapolation, but that doesn’t get one past a very serious problem with this whole “underreporting claim”: The only way we can say sexual assaults are underreported is if we have a cohort of people (and I have no idea whether there’s ever been a rigorous statistical analysis of a such a cohort) who say, “Oh, I was sexually assaulted but for x, y, or z reasons, I never reported the assault to the police.”

The problem with accepting those statements as proof that sexual assault is underreported is (a) that, with this kind of self-reporting, we don’t have records, as we do when the criminal justice system gets involved, about the nature of the act, i.e., whether it was goosing someone, calling them a sexually insulting name, or raping them, all of which are assaults related to sex but are very different in nature; and (b) that we don’t have any way of knowing whether these “underreported” sexual assaults actually happened.

If a sexual assault goes into the criminal justice system, we have evidence as to the nature of the assault and we have police and judicial proceedings that give us some insight into whether the claimed assault actually happened or if it was a false claim, intended either to harm a specific man or to gain sympathy and drama for a psychopathic woman. The whole underreporting theory provides alleged data that’s based on . . . well, nothing.

Item: Let’s talk about rape hoaxes and fake rape claims. The current mantra from the Left when anyone who isn’t named Keith Ellison, Bill Clinton, or Teddy Kennedy is involved, and especially when a Republican figure is involved, is that women must be believed.

Joe Biden decided to change the foundational premise of our Western criminal justice system, which is that someone is innocent until proven guilty:

For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time. But nobody fails to understand that this is like jumping into a cauldron.

Kirsten Gillibrand went for the “I believe because . . . abortion” theory of truth-telling, mixed in with a soupçon of “you’re guilty unless you demand that the FBI prove you’re innocent of a time-barred, alleged assault that occurred at some indeterminate time and place with the only named witnesses denying the event”:

I believe Dr. Blasey Ford because she’s telling the truth. And you know it by her story; you know it by the fact that she told her therapist five years ago. It was documented at the time; we have the therapist’s notes. She told her husband. This is a trauma she’s been dealing with her whole life. She doesn’t want to be in a bedroom that doesn’t have two doors; people knew that about her a long time ago. She told a friend a year ago. She told a reporter before Judge Kavanaugh was ever named.

These are the hallmarks of truth. These are the hallmarks of someone who wants to be believed because she fears that if this person is confirmed, he will do terrible things for [American] women. She is concerned that he does not have the character, the integrity, the honesty to be a Supreme Court Justice.

I believe her because she’s telling the truth. She is asking the FBI to investigate her claims. She is asking for that kind of review, that investigative work, that oversight, that accountability because she’s telling the truth.

Someone who is lying does not ask the FBI to investigate their claims. Who is not asking the FBI to investigate these claims? The White House. Judge Kavanaugh has not asked to have the FBI review these claims. Is that the reaction of an innocent person? It is not. So we have to get to the bottom of this as Americans before we put someone on the Supreme Court for life.

Mazie Hirono opted for the “shut up, evil men!” approach to dealing with guilt or innocence:

I expect the men in this country and the men in this committee because we all signed on to this letter to demand an FBI investigation. But really guess who is perpetuating all of these kinds of actions? It’s the men in this country. And I just want to say to the men in this country: just shut up and step up, do the right thing for a change.

And of course, there’s Hillary Clinton, the same gal who used to go totally scorched earth against the women who credibly, and over the course of decades, accused her husband of rape and other forms of aggressive, physical, and highly unwanted, sexual attacks against women:

I could cite endless other examples, but it’s boring and scary to wade through the totalitarian brain, especially when that brain is becoming the dominant note in one of America’s two major political parties.

The common thread in all of the above is that women would never lie about rape. But we know that’s untrue. Sadly, women lie about rape all the time. That doesn’t mean that all or most women lie about rape, it just means that lying about rape is definitely a thing:

  • The Scottsboro Boys were imprisoned and had their lives otherwise destroyed based upon two women’s false rape allegations.
  • 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally lynched when a woman lied about him grabbing her in a sexual manner.
  • The utterly vile Al Sharpton came to national prominence, and unleashed racial violence, when he latched onto Tawana Brawley’s false rape claims against four white men.
  • Three members of the Duke Lacrosse team were tried on a false rape claim (with the woman who made the claim later going on to murder her boyfriend).
  • Rolling Stone magazine, whether acting intentionally or foolishly, tarred a University of Virginia fraternity as rape central based upon an obviously false story by a disturbed young woman who wanted a boy’s attention.
  • In England, a woman got ten years in prison for repeatedly making false rape claims, one of which saw a man wrongly imprisoned himself.

Those are just some examples. I recommend checking out the Innocence Projects’ list almost 300 overturned sex crime convictions that saw men spend years or decades in prison.

So when those Leftist politicians state that women never lie — the politicians are lying and, unless they were born yesterday, they know they’re lying. Their claims about women and rape, or women and harassment, or women and whatever, are knowing frauds stated for political purposes.

And of course, as noted with reference to Hillary above, the flip side is true. Never, never think you can get away with blaming a useful Democrat of rape, even if your charges are manifestly truthful. There was a brief window last year, during the first flare-up of #MeToo, when the establishment allowed women (and some men) to purge men who were no longer politically useful, such as Weinstein, Spacey, Keillor, Rose, or Lauer.

Now, though, after that paroxysm, we’re back to lauding (1) Teddy Kennedy, the manslaughtering, raping Lion of the Senate; (2) Bill Clinton, the “put some ice on that” eminence grise of the Democrat party; and (3) Keith Ellison, the “I don’t care about the contemporaneous police report of sexual assault because I’m a Muslim black man,” second-in-command of the Democrat National Committee.

IRelying on the several items I’ve stated above there are a three obvious trends emanating from the Left:

  1. If you do it, no matter what you do, it’s rape. If we do it, no matter what we do, it’s not even sexual harassment.
  2. To tighten control over young women, beginning in college, we will falsely induce in them fear and hatred of heterosexual men by taking every interaction between men and women and portraying it as a form of assault and power abuse.
  3. If women cry rape against a Republican or straight white male, they are telling the truth, no matter the manifest holes in, frivolity of, or political motive behind their claim; if they blame a Democrat, they are lying, no matter the objective evidence supporting their claim.

In other words, the Left has blurred the lines. When it comes to relationships between men and women, whether neutral, playful, irritating, dangerous, or criminal, there is no longer any absolute truth. By gaming the numbers and glossing over definitions that once had meaning in terms of defining human behavior, the notion of rape as a specific criminal act no longer exists. Sexual assault, as a violent criminally-defined act, no longer exists. All that exists is control over the narrative and over women’s fears.

It’s blurred lines, folks, except without the catchy beat and semi-naked models:

This is the Kafka-esque world into which poor Brett Kavanaugh has stumbled. Kavanaugh thought he was going to prove his qualifications for the Supreme Court by pointing to an exemplary life that goes back at least 35 years, by pointing to a sterling academic record, by highlighting brilliant opinions, and by stalwart fealty to the Constitution. How could he have imagined 27 years after the failed attack on Clarence Thomas that the sexual terrorism of blurred lines would strike again?