Driver
Posts: 649 Joined: June 2011
|
Quote (Patrick @ Aug. 15 2013,14:20) | Quote (Driver @ Aug. 15 2013,08:33) | Quote (midwifetoad @ Aug. 15 2013,09:36) | Of course it's not all right to have sex with a woman who is too drunk to give informed consent.
It is also perfectly legal to stroll down any street in any neighborhood on any Saturday night.
There are laws and there are rules of decency. There's also common sense.
I asked my wife about this. Her question was what did she expect? If the accusation is true then Shermer is a pig, but it's not surprising that such men exist. A good chunk of literature is devoted to what happens when you mix men, women and alcohol.
Edit to add: I'm not blaming the victim, but I think it's fair to point out that bad people exist; preditors are over-represented among alpha males and celebrities; this is well known and frequently in the news; and finally, it is possible for a bad person and a foolish person to occupy the same room at the same time. |
What you are saying is that men can party but women can't. This is not the right way to go about things.
|
No, he's making the point that, while burglars are responsible for robberies, leaving your doors unlocked is still unwise.
Quote | This is not about being alone on a street. We are talking about TAM, Skepticon etc.
|
Allegedly about those conferences. Thus far no evidence has been presented.
Quote | Anyway, the anecdote related was not about getting deliberately blind drunk. It's not that hard to get someone more drunk than they intended when they have had a couple of glasses, especially if you have the status advantage. |
Which is why it is important to know your limits and your intentions before deliberately impairing your own judgement.
Note that I am not blaming the victim of non-consensual sex. If someone commits that crime, they should be punished severely. This is advice for avoiding the situation in the first place. In an ideal world, there would be no risk of that happening. We don't live in that world. Quote | But most important of all, a victim's choices are NOT the point. To see this, think of anyone who commented on a murder or non-sexual assault charge with criticism of the victim's intoxication level. Irrelevant victim blaming isn't it? Dalton's segment was highly inappropriate. |
You are ignoring Dalton's other key point. PZ Myers publicly accused Michael Shermer of rape based on second or third hand hearsay. Myer's blog is popular enough that this accusation will be returned in Google searches for Shermer. This kind of accusation is legally defamation per se.
Dalton is noting that the so-called skeptics at Pharyngula are accepting those claims without any evidence. |
I am not ignoring his point about the sources. I disagree with it, but what I AM saying is that his response was highly inappropriate.
Whenever it comes to any other type of assault, people's first response is not to speculate on what the victim might have done to facilitate the attack. Think about that. We don't do this for any other crime, I don't think, let alone assault.
I already said that Dalton's comparison to the Gospels is stupid, but if it were not his response would STILL have been highly inappropriate.
Myers' source is not hearsay, this is corroborated testimony by women he knows personally. Now you can argue that to us it is hearsay, but... really? PZ Myers is making it up? Do you really believe that?
This is not completely news about Shermer, btw, and I see no reason to be skeptical about a woman's corroborated claim that she was raped. Most accounts of rape are not lies.
Myers' decision was not about court standards of evidence and conviction, but about warning women to avoid a man who already had some reputation amongst quite a few skeptic conference-attending women as a predator, operating in a world where we have good evidence that a microculture of assault (including rape) and rape apology already exists. See Karen Stollznow and Ashley Paramore.
-------------- Why would I concern myself with evidence, when IMO "evidence" is only the mind arranging thought and matter to support what one already wishes to believe? - William J Murray
[A]t this time a forum like this one is nothing less than a national security risk. - Gary Gaulin
|