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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Let's bite the bullet here. We've both got significant experience in the medical field, you more than me. But we both know that even the best psychiatrists aren't perfect. We also know that college age is prime time for development of psychotic disorders and bipolar disorder. So what's the odds, given that, that a woman that is mostly OK but maybe a little manic, maybe just an energetic person that can totally consent...when she has sex with Brand becomes floridly psychotic three days later, winds up in a psych ward, and then truly doesn't recall whether the sex happened before or after she was manic or psychotic?

Hell, it is possible (although unlikely) that someone that is a ward of the state (or otherwise in State custody/guardianship) manages to bust out of their group home or whatever, get to Brand, and seem like a more or less sane and put together person. Maybe 99 percent of the time or even 99.9 percent of the time wards of the state don't look competent, but 0.1 percent of the time on any given day they do, and occasionally they break loose or run away from their group homes to live on Christmas tree farms or follow rockstars or something. Intelligent schizophrenics can cook up at least superficially plausible bullshit from time to time...it is a matter of slinging enough bull feces at enough walls and ultimately something sticks.

So what's the odds, given that, that a woman that is mostly OK but maybe a little manic, maybe just an energetic person that can totally consent...when she has sex with Brand becomes floridly psychotic three days later, winds up in a psych ward, and then truly doesn't recall whether the sex happened before or after she was manic or psychotic?

A) Brand is screwing hundreds of women, maybe thousands, over his career.

B) Such groupies are significantly more likely to be BPD, manic, or just a little off kilter in a million ways. The kind of people who are jumping at opportunity to do blow and blow rockstars aren't quite the average women, even if I wouldn't pathologize them outright.

Then now, does it strike you as particularly unlikely that over a career of several decades, one of them would experience such an episode?

The odds per any given groupie might be miniscule, but when you consider the massive number of them he's fucked over the years..

If someone has slept with hundreds of women, then you shouldn't be particularly surprised if one documented incident overlapped temporally with something concerning. It's just not nearly as damning as for a dude who's getting poon every 6 months in college.

This is kind of my point. Joe Average has like ten partners in a lifetime. If he's more or less prudent he has let's say a 99.9 percent chance of not sticking it in someone that might not be able to consent. That's probably going to keep him out of trouble. Not so for Brant.