#BLM: Dealing In Dirt And Stealing In The Name Of The Lord

In the George Orwell book Animal Farm, the farm animals successfully revolt against the cruel human overlord and his minions. The pigs, being more intelligent and selfish, seize leadership and gradually return the other animals to their previous low status. 

The pigs either rewrite the rules or employ insulting lawyerly sophistries to declare that a violation of both the word and spirit of the commandment is actually no violation at all. The pigs claim any detractor is a traitor working with the humans. 

I recalled this fiction when I ran across a news story about a similar set of pigs evidently working assiduously to enrich themselves from the blood, sweat, and tears of those they apparently regard as less than.

On a sunny day late last spring, three leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement — Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Melina Abdullah — sat around a table on the patio of an expensive house in Southern California. 

“For me, the hardest moments have been the right-wing-media machine just leveraging literally all its weight against me, against our movement, against BLM the organization,” Cullors said. “I’m some weeks out now from a lot of the noise, so I have more perspective, right? While I was in it, I was in survival mode.” She was referring to an April 2021 article in the New York Post that revealed her purchase of four homes for nearly $3 million.

Jackie's UVA Rolling Stone Rape Allegation Falls Apart

It should scarcely need to be said but obviously rape is one of the worst crimes a person can commit, second only to murder. So society should do its best to prevent rape and failing that, to punish rape harshly. You may recall that a while back we did a skeptical post on the fact that Rolling Stone magazine was forced to retract its story about a gang rape at UVA. Since that time the local police looked into the story. They did everything in their power to avoid saying that "Jackie", the alleged victim, was lying. What they did say is that there was no substantive basis to support her story. Similarly Rolling Stone outsourced an investigation of its journalistic process and procedures surrounding this story to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The School recently released its report. The report wasn't good in the same way that someone who comes home with 6 F's and one D on her report card didn't have a good semester. You can read the very long Columbia report for yourself if you are so inclined. For those of you who do not have the time or interest to read through 12,000 words let's just say that the report calmly eviscerates the lax reporting, fact checking and editorial standards at Rolling Stone magazine. If Erdely had called Kathryn Hendley and Alex Stock – their true names – to check their sides of Jackie's account of Sept. 28 and 29, they would have denied saying any of the words Jackie attributed to them (as Ryan would have as well). They would have described for Erdely a history of communications with Jackie that would have left the reporter with many new questions. For example, the friends said that Jackie told them that her date on Sept. 28 was not a lifeguard but a student in her chemistry class named Haven Monahan. (The Charlottesville police said in March they could not identify a UVA student or any other person named Haven Monahan.) All three friends would have spoken to Erdely, they said, if they had been contacted.

I always thought that "Jackie" was making stuff up. Let's say I said I'm going on a date. I show you a picture of my date and it's a 1970s picture of Pam Grier. I state that this woman is not Pam Grier but rather an old high school classmate whom I haven't seen in decades. You might reasonably conclude that I was lying through my teeth. This would especially be the case after you tracked down that old high school classmate and she told you that she hadn't talked to me since high school and had never dated me. 

Unfortunately similar to witch trials or child abuse accusations we have allowed the country and its institutions of higher learning among others to become infected with the feminist idea that to even question a rape victim's story is proof of a misogynistic and rape apologist mindset. If a story can't be questioned and can't be weighed against alternate explanations, then how can we have a justice system? An accusation should be enough. Whether we're talking criminal charges, civil suits or journalism, a small but healthy amount of skepticism is important to keep close at hand. When someone already has a strong pov about an issue as Sabrina Rubin Erdely clearly did, it's essential to watch out for confirmation bias and ensure that questions are asked which will challenge the hypothesis.

You may hear some people saying that we should automatically believe victims. Well that's well and good for people I know intimately. I will believe them if they tell me that X happened. But for everyone else I'm going to require some level of proof. And I would certainly expect that other people who don't know me or mine would feel the same way. I wouldn't be offended if you were non-committal in automatically believing something you were told by someone I knew well but you did not know at all. It's why we have society wide procedures set up to determine if someone was a victim in the first place. It's only after that critical fact has been determined when we can start "believing victims" or "helping victims find their voice" or so forth and so on. Rolling Stone Publisher Jann Wenner has so far stood by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the freelance writer of the untrue article, as well as the other editors and supervisors involved in this nonsense. Erdely will continue to write for the magazine. No one will lose their job. This is of course completely ridiculous. It shows how deep the rot has gone in traditional media. Too many readers and viewers no longer care what the truth is. They just want to have their biases supported. Every event must be placed into service to one or another ideological goal, no matter how much fact-bending or "truthiness" must be deployed. Even though Jackie is an apparent liar some people are trying to place all the blame on Rolling Stone. They simply can't find it in themselves to say Jackie lied.

We all have biases. I am not overly fond of police officers. If I were on a jury where there was strong evidence of police misconduct, the accused had better hope God has mercy on him because I surely won't. But if there is equally strong or even stronger evidence that the person accusing the police officer of a crime is lying then I have to vote to acquit. It doesn't matter how much of a problem I think police brutality is in society. Truth is more important than "social justice". Women who lie about rape do a disservice to everyone. They should own that. The fraternity is apparently going to sue Rolling Stone magazine. I don't know how much of a case they will have. Legal experts can give their opinion. But if that is the only way to make Rolling Stone change its practices, then I'm all in favor. It's important that rape victims come forward. It's also important that liars and hoaxers be revealed as such.

NYC Subway "Manspreading" Double Standards

Big Sister Is Watching You

I am often glad that I live in a region where public transportation is all but considered an environmentalist plot to deprive every true blue red blooded American of his right to drive a vehicle of his choosing anywhere he wants to all by himself if he so desires. Okay that is obviously an exaggeration but not by all that much. People like their cars and trucks around here. What public transportation exists in southeast Michigan is modest and often doesn't go beyond municipal boundaries. Although downtown population densities are slightly increasing, suburban sprawl remains king. Even people who live and work within the same city usually drive to work instead of taking the bus. There isn't really any train or subway system. Outside of married people working at the same firm, carpooling isn't all that common. Single driver usage rules. This means of course that each driver is king or queen of their own vehicle and all that resides within it. They can listen to music as loudly as they wish, recline their seat as far back as they want, use the passenger's seat as a combination office desk/restaurant table and sit in their seat however they damn well please. This last consideration is under some attack in New York City. Apparently there are some women people who have decided that how some other men people sit on the subway is not only rude, gross and downright nasty but that it's also sexist, unchivalrous, in need of public shaming and likely eventual ticketing by police. Yes I am talking about that apparent scourge of New York City public transportation, men sitting with their legs wider apart than some women care to experience. The horror!!! The horror!!!  



It is the bane of many female subway riders. It is a scourge tracked on blogs and on Twitter. And it has a name almost as distasteful as the practice itself. It is manspreading, the lay-it-all-out sitting style that more than a few men see as their inalienable underground right. Now passengers who consider such inelegant male posture as infringing on their sensibilities — not to mention their share of subway space — have a new ally: the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Taking on manspreading for the first time, the authority is set to unveil public service ads that encourage men to share a little less of themselves in the city’s ever-crowded subways cars. The targets of the campaign, those men who spread their legs wide, into a sort of V-shaped slouch, effectively occupying two, sometimes even three, seats are not hard to find. Whether they will heed the new ads is another question. Riding the F train from Brooklyn to Manhattan on a recent afternoon, Fabio Panceiro, 20, was unapologetic about sitting with his legs spread apart. “I’m not going to cross my legs like ladies do,” he said. “I’m going to sit how I want to sit.” And what if Mr. Panceiro, an administrative assistant from Los Angeles, saw posters on the train asking him to close his legs? “I’d just laugh at the ad and hope that someone graffitis over it,” he said.

For Kelley Rae O’Donnell, an actress who confronts manspreaders and tweets photos of them, her solitary shaming campaign now has the high-powered help of the transportation authority, whose ads will be plastered inside subway cars. “It drives me crazy,” she said of men who spread their legs. “I find myself glaring at them because it just seems so inconsiderate in this really crowded city.” When Ms. O’Donnell, who lives in Brooklyn and is in her 30s, asks men to move, she said, they rarely seem chastened: “I usually get grumbling or a complete refusal.”
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Football Players Oppressing Women

I can't believe, well actually I can believe it so that wouldn't have been an accurate statement. I will say that I am more amused than annoyed by the extent to which some people, in this case feminists, will go to extremes to find something to be irritated about which just happens to be primarily done by the opposite gender. Honestly I think that if we were truthful with each other each gender could probably come up with what they think of as excellent reasons that or circumstances in which the opposite gender should be more like their own. I know I could. Generally though, those sorts of discussions are mostly held in single gender forums. Most people don't take them all that seriously. They are just ways to blow off steam. Most people left behind the "Oooh (boys/girls) are icky" stage of life when they were around twelve years old. The so-called "War of The Sexes" will never be lost or won because there's always too much fraternization with the enemy as Kissinger pointed out. Some differences are made to be enjoyed and sought after; others perhaps can be amusingly tolerated. But in any event certain differences are real. They aren't going anywhere. So people should just learn to deal with them. In the big picture I don't think the differences are that important. Making a brouhaha out of how men sit is from where I stand just incredibly narcissistic and entitled. It's also dare I say, more than a little bossy. It shouldn't need to be said but evidently some people need to understand that men by definition have different anatomy than women and are also generally larger than women. Men sitting a certain way doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being sexist or aggressive against women or anything like that. Most of them just need the room. If trying to bully men into sitting like women is the most important issue in New York City, then I congratulate New York City for having solved such issues as housing segregation, police brutality, gentrification, rising income inequality, bad schools and other evils that the rest of the the country is still battling.

The King of The North Is Inconsiderate

We talked about the decline of chivalry before. Although I was raised to be chivalrous the world has definitely changed since my youth during the Pleistocene Epoch. There are not as many women today as there were then who appreciate chivalry. But putting that aside I fail to see how sitting like a man is by definition unchivalrous. It sounds to me like some of the women complaining have less of a problem with ungracious men than they do with men period. That's a personal issue. I don't think it should be of concern to the state. Silliness aside this campaign really sounds like something that would take place in a nation like Singapore where individual rights and choices are considered far less important than rigidly enforced cultural conformity. If I were sitting on a bus or train and some woman wanted to sit next to me I would be polite and try to give her as much room as I could. Within limits. But if she starts to photograph me and harangue me about how I am sitting or how my supposed "male entitlement" offends her delicate sensibilities well she will get an entirely different response. Now just imagine if yours truly walked up to a young woman and explained that I was grossly offended because her skirt was too short or her purse was too large and taking up too much space or that she was too fat and blocking other people from using adjacent seats. I'm betting that wouldn't end well. It certainly wouldn't get a twitter campaign, a public transportation PR initiative or a supportive NYT article. It's funny to me that some women will try to deflate any criticism of their actions by calling it shaming but in this instance are trying to explicitly shame men for being men. Like I wrote above, I'm glad that I live where I do and avoid public transportation. The only busybodies I have to deal with are in the workplace. To be fair there are almost as many people in NYC as there are in the entirety of Michigan so perhaps I don't fully grok the concerns around space. Either way I thought this story was funny as can be.

What are your thoughts?

Rolling Stone Magazine Retracts UVA Fraternity Rape Allegations

Although it should scarcely need to be repeated for the generally fair minded individuals who read this blog every last single one of us has our own individual biases, which are often magnified and accelerated by our experiences and the gender, race, class, sexual, political and other identities through which we experience the world. It’s just the way human beings are. So that is why it is important, though we can all forget it from time to time, to remember that an accusation does not equal proof that a crime occurred. Sometimes people do not remember what happened. Sometimes people lie. And I have not seen any evidence that shows that lying is solely or even disproportionately the preserve of one gender or another. Men and women are equally human. We all have both angels and devils lurking within.

So when the Rolling Stone story about an alleged gang rape at UVA came out, complete with such lurid details as beatings and rape as fraternity initiation and a woman being violated on top of broken glass, I didn’t feel one way or the other about it. I wanted to see some proof. There were some inconsistencies in the account that made me think that this was more of an urban legend than an actual event but I am not a journalist or criminologist. If true then someone definitely should have been arrested and charged (unless of course the assailants were cops but I digress) Unfortunately UVA and the people who are concerned with stopping rape didn’t bother waiting to find out whether this was true or not before taking action against the fraternity (in UVA’s case) or repeating what have turned out to be untruths (in the case of the media and various other social justice warriors)


Well sometimes people who rush to be first forget to check if they're right. Other investigators, journalists and writers raised some of the same questions I had about the rape allegations. Rolling Stone actually had to go back and check its story. And it found that some of the details didn't hold up under scrutiny.

In the article, published on Nov. 19, writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely described the brutal rape of a woman — identified as Jackie — by seven men at a 2012 fraternity party, the university's failure to respond to the alleged attack and the school's troubled history of handling such cases. After its publication, both the university and the Charlottesville, Va., police department launched investigations and the fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, suspended its operations.

On Friday, Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana issued an apology, saying there were "discrepancies" in the woman's account. "In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced," Dana wrote. "We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story."

Earlier this week, Erdely, who had been criticized for relying on a single source and not contacting the men accused of rape, said she stood by her reporting.“I am convinced that it could not have been done any other way, or any better,” Erdely told the New York Times. “I am also not interested in diverting the conversation away from the point of the piece itself.”

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Unfortunately I’ve seen first hand the impact that rape can have on a person. It is important to state again that nobody in his or her right mind is in favor of rape. Aside from murder, rape is the worst crime you can commit against someone. So to make up something that didn’t happen, to lie about rape because you think that the greater good requires it, is a particularly low malevolent malodorous foul thing to do. But this wasn’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. Human nature guarantees that slanderous false accusations will happen again. There’s no real way to stop that. But what people should remember, and I definitely include myself in this, is that just because someone you already don’t like for other reasons is accused of committing a crime doesn’t mean that they did it. If someone is convicted of rape then let them pay the penalty and then some. But accusations or stories are not equal to proof, no matter how much some of us might want them to be. Lies about rape make it more difficult for real rape victims to obtain justice. It is the nature of our justice system that some rapists will be found not guilty at trial. I don’t think that requires a rejection of the idea of “innocent until proven guilty” or that people think it’s okay to lie about an accusation. When Erdely says that she is not interested in diverting the conversation from the point of the piece itself that is a red flag that such things as truth and reality are less important to her than the cause. And that is or rather should be a problem for any of us, let alone a journalist. Erdely didn't even bother talking to the accused. She apparently didn't do basic fact checking like seeing if there was actually a frat party on the night in question. There wasn't. Truth should be among the highest values to which we aspire. There is no justice without truth.