the_others
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User ID: 2680
the_others
12d ago
No? Sororities can police what their own members do but they have no right to generate the rape accusation that would not have existed but for their involvement.
A rule that is both unwritten and unstated is also known as a rule that doesn't exist. OP alleged that their rule existed to such an extent that it overpowered the actual written and stated rule.
If you don't have publicly available evidence to back up your point, we have to treat you as wrong as a matter of discourse.
the_others
13d ago
The fact that third parties have an interest in meddling doesn't make it not "is there anyone you forgot to ask". Obviously, if they're meddling, they have an interest. This is true of the original meme too.
The point of "is there anyone you forgot to ask" is that they have no inherent right to insert themselves.
the_others
13d ago
Who gets to decide what the law is? Why do you get to punish these men for breaking the law inside your head when you haven't done the work to win the fight against the people who think the law should be something else?
the_others
13d ago
At the time of the event, what was the publicly available evidence that the line was what you say it is? Imagine you're debating a sex-negative feminist whose position is "at Cornell, the line is consent and that's a bad thing -- we should change it". What would you say to convince onlookers that she's wrong and that she already has her preferred policy in place? Heck, there are plenty of people in this thread who are arguing that the current line is consent and that's a bad thing -- are they wrong about the current line being consent?
I think you are just factually wrong about what the line is. The line is consent. You can wish it was something else, but it's not. Until you change it, you (or the rest of the lynch mob) shouldn't get to enforce your desired line.
If your position is that the consent framework is bad, then neither the boys nor the girl is at fault. They are simply products of the system. The correct people to assign fault to in that scenario are the people who created, advertised, and enforced the consent framework. This is true both in a moral sense and in a "how do we create better outcomes" sense. Skewering a bunch of boys who literally could not have known to do anything else does nothing to effect the change you want because those boys have no power to change the system. To change the system, you must influence the people who actually have power, who are neither the boys nor the girl, but the horde of faceless teachers, activists, and bureaucrats who actually set the rules.
Going after the boys is just going after the weakest party in the case. Sure, it's "choosing your battles", but you're only choosing that battle because you can win it and feel good, not because winning that battle does anything.
the_others
13d ago
Imagine that it's the night before the events in the story and you are tasked with arguing the case for "the line is the woman not having regretted last night's activities" against someone who is arguing "the line is consent". What evidence would you be able to bring to bear compared to the evidence that your debate opponent would be able to bring to bear? Remember, the debate is not what the line should be, but what the line is.
Would you be able to produce evidence that outweighs the legions of institutions who loudly proclaim consent being the line?
the_others
13d ago
If every institution from cradle to frat house in their lives has told them the line is consent, and the actual line is such a secret that even posters on The Motte shy away from saying what the line is, how is it conceivably their fault in any way? Quite literally, how could they possibly know, or indeed, how could they possibly have known that they didn't know?
the_others
13d ago
How confident are you that the facts of the case support your thesis?
Reliable information is obviously difficult to get right now, but one narrative I've seen, supposedly supported by texts between the girl and one of the main boys involved, is that in the immediate aftermath, all parties involved were perfectly content with the situation, and it was only when the girl's sorority sisters heard about what happened and slut-shamed her that she experienced negative effects (including the disinviting from the Halloween party, done at the request of the sisters). In this telling, it's very much a "is there anyone you forgot to ask" situation, where third parties are inserting themselves into something that they have no business inserting themselves into.
I'm personally skeptical that the frat bros acted like the cartoon villains you describe because my experience with UMC Gen Z men is that they are respectful of women to a fault, and the descriptions of their behavior in the initial police report seem to support that these particular Gen Z men are no different. It seems more like the feminist mob having an idea of what an evil frat bro would do and ascribing that behavior to the boys in this case.
The rage is over men's, as a collective, perceived ability to dodge consequences for sex.
The implication behind this statement is that there ought to be consequences for sex beyond what is negotiated up front. If you asked the collective of women raging at these men what those consequences should be, what would they say? Would they agree with each other? Could they even bear to say it out loud?
the_others
16d ago
My implication is that any unactionable reason risks being perceived as bad or superficial because it is unactionable.
Yes, and women are currently being perceived as good and non-superficial above and beyond their ability to be good and non-superficial. Correcting this perception is good and desirable. We should, as a society, seek to perceive people as they are.
Women today benefit from a perception that they are wiser and that their desires and preferences reflect moral truth. Giving a true, unactionable reason damages this perception, which is why most do not want to do it. However, if we made it common knowledge that this is not the case, individual women would not need to give false reasons because they would already be correctly perceived as bad and non-superficial (or more accurately, less good and less superficial than they are currently perceived to be). The way to make this knowledge common is to hold women to strict standards when they say falsely represent their desires and correct them on it publicly.
the_others
17d ago
If the reason is good and actionable, and the man actions it, then they get back together and live happily ever after.
If the reason is good and unactionable, then they separate cleanly and no drama ensues.
The only way it turns out badly is if the reason is bad (for example, the reason given is not the true reason). The implication of your reasoning is that all reasons women give are bad, in which case we should recognize that as a society and judge women as a group accordingly.
(For the record, I think a big enough subset of women are capable of giving good reasons that we shouldn't do stuff like repeal the 19th amendment, but that's not the implication of your post.)
the_others
19d ago
The fact that intoxication itself doesn't legally mean it's rape (at least in some states) is surprising to me given how much it was hammered into me during college that any amount of alcohol meant that consent was impossible (as long as the person was female, though this part I knew couldn't be literally written into the law).
the_others
21d ago
Yes, I should have looked deeper before giving my personal opinion on the likelihood of guilt.
What else is the college supposed to do? The cops looked into it in 2024 and concluded there was no criminal case, expulsion is then actually the maximum possible punishment. This is actually evidence of hysteria because you can be expelled for things which the legal system concluded had no merit.
When the type of punishment is already maxed out, the next variable is the number of people being punished. They can't expel the expelled students any harder, but if they wanted to project a stronger anti-rape message, they could expel more of them (in this case, other frat members for their alleged involvement).
the_others
21d ago
I hadn't been paying close attention to the details of the story and I was under the impression that her being unconscious (and therefore incapable of consent) was an agreed-upon fact. Upon closer reading it does seem like the unconscious part is under contention, with the DA saying that when the incident was originally reported, she did not report being unconscious, which seems like the classic story-changing pattern.
Maybe I was too quick to update.
the_others
21d ago
An old staple of the culture war has resurfaced: District attorney reopens case of alleged Cornell University 'gang rape'. The core allegation is that the girl went to a frat house, got pressured to snort ketamine, passed out, and was raped by multiple people while unconscious.
I first heard about this case from someone at Cornell a bit after it happened. She was adamant that the frat boys were guilty and that there was conclusive proof (though she didn't personally know what the proof was), but the administration went easy* on them because of misogyny. Obviously, this set off alarm bells in my head because it pattern-matched well with Duke Lacrosse, Mattress Girl, etc. I said that it sounded like there wasn't enough evidence to tell, while in the back of my mind thinking that the accusation was probably false.
I was somewhat surprised when I read today that this conclusive proof does sort of exist, in the form of a Snapchat screenshot wherein someone in the fraternity's group chat posted that there was "free pussy upstairs". It's not quite conclusive proof, but it's much better proof than I expected. At this point my assessment is that the accusation is probably basically real.
This got me to thinking about whether it was time to update my model of the world, and whether the discourse around campus rape has changed over the past 10+ years. In a media environment where Jezebel is dead and Rolling Stone irrelevant, should we still expect the mainstream media to be biased to the point of uselessness? What about the power dynamics? Who is Cornell more afraid of, feminists or Republican OCRs?
There're also the evergreen questions, like what the responsibility of a university should be in cases like this, or what the police department or justice system should do. Seasoned culture warriors will point out that wanting to be hard on this kind of crime correlates with wanting to be soft on other kinds of crime.
Another thing that came to mind was the question of how grievous a crime we should consider rape to be. In my lifetime, rape has generally been considered equivalent to murder in severity ("rape and murder" usually being used to indicate the category of "super serious crime"), and the question of whether that's a good thing has been debated to death. However, Zoomers are famously more prudish than Millennials. Does it follow that Zoomers also regard rape as a greater crime, relatively speaking, than Millennials do?
*I see people claiming on Reddit and other places that the alleged rapists' only punishment was that they had to write apologetic essays, but this is not true -- at least two members of the fraternity were expelled. Whether this is a light punishment is up for debate.
the_others
2mo ago
"Female" being associated with misogyny has nothing to do trans and is more related to normie feminism. Feminists complained that people were using "girls" to refer to groups consisting of at least some adult women, so some people started using "females" to refer to those groups as a hypercorrection. This didn't satisfy the complainers; for an example, see the /r/MenAndFemales subreddit, dedicated to pointing out instances of people using "men" for men and "females" for women and gesturing at the apparent misogyny.
This has led to a hyperstitious cascade where the people still using the word "female" are less feminist than average.
the_others
2mo ago
How often do you clean your shoes? If they're shoes that you wear outside regularly, they're obviously dirty in comparison to a typical indoor space.
the_others
3mo ago
I appreciate the detailed analysis. A few minor points:
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The Japanese school year starts in the spring, so summer vacation happens during a school year, not in between two school years. This doesn't change too much about the quadratic evidence though, since she's also specifically being made to take summer classes because she's behind, so even if she's actually in high school, her schoolwork could be remedial middle school stuff.
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The Japanese cutoff date for when you start school based off your birthday is April 1, which is also around when the school year starts. So most students start high school at 15. If Misuzu turns 15 in the summer, that means she was 14 when the school year started, which would make it her third year of middle school.
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It's been a long time for me, but is it ever explicitly stated that the school is a high school and not a middle school? I remember this being vague. I know that some girls from Kanon make a cameo appearance, but there's no reason to think that the Air versions of Ayu and co. are the same age as the Kanon versions, or that they're the same year as Misuzu (unless there's some "different years have differently colored ribbons" thing going on?).
If I had to give a number for Misuzu's age I'd definitely say 15 as more likely than any other.
I'd be interested to see if you had any thoughts on how old Kanna was during the events of 1000 years ago. Narrative niceness would dictate she be the same age as Misuzu during the events of Air, but 15 seems too old for Kanna.
the_others
3mo ago
After the red card and before this happened, the general sentiment from my mostly liberal social circles was "What's the point of having a corrupt government if they won't step in at times like this?"
Now everyone is pretty happy.
the_others
3mo ago
I think Misuzu is closer to 15 based on a shot we see of her half-eaten birthday cake in the anime (which for plot reasons, we know has the right number of candles), but the bigger point is that she's not a particularly sexualized character and I wouldn't expect someone having her as a profile picture to be thirsting for her.
the_others
3mo ago
"18 and 17 is fine" was not the dominant view when I was in high school (which was not too long ago, and since then things have only moved in the direction of it being less fine). Every adult at school that spoke on the topic explicitly said that 18 and 17 was not fine, and 17 and 17 was also not fine.
It is still the case in some US states such as California that 17 and 17 is illegal.
the_others
3mo ago
It's only standard among people who are in too deep. When US schoolchildren learn about court cases, they learn about Marbury v. Madison, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Brown v. Board of Education, not Marbury, Plessy, and Brown.
I've noticed an increase in single-word references to court cases in the past decade. One particularly irritating one is people saying "Roe" for Roe v. Wade since context isn't always clear in speech and row/rho/Ro/Roe/roe can mean many things.
the_others
6mo ago
Don't most people take the SATs in their junior year? College applications start going out in October so there isn't much time to take them in senior year.
the_others
11mo ago
Depending on your proclivities, it could also be "based outgroup"?
I don't know when the relevant portion of the wall was built, but the Great Wall of China was used as a defensive fortification as recently as 1933.
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