Monday, May 15, 2017



Rape is OK if an illegal does it

Ann Coulter

The same media that slavishly ignored the alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl by two illegal immigrants in Rockville, Maryland, spent last week crowing about the prosecutor’s refusal to bring charges.

It turns out that illegal aliens gang-raping a 14-year-old girl in a bathroom stall is not a statutory rape because … the girl had previously sent one of her assailants prurient text messages.

Somebody better tell the college campuses.

Columbia University’s Mattress Girl, Emma Sulkowicz, became an international cause celebre after alleging rape against a fellow student to whom she’d sent dozens of desperate and salacious messages — including, most memorably, “f–k me in the butt,” and “I wuv you so much.”

She’d also had consensual sex with him several times, only one of which she deemed “rape.”

Sulkowicz’s “f–k me in the butt” texts were no impediment to her becoming the face of silenced rape victims on campus. She was sympathetically profiled everywhere; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand invited her to Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address; and she dragged a mattress around campus with her as her senior thesis project …

“… a succinct and powerful performance piece …” — The New York Times

“… like ‘The Vagina Monologues,’ only more subtle …” — Ann Coulter

In its lavish coverage of our brave mattress-toting heroine, the Times reminded readers: “False reports of rape are rare, many experts say.” In fact, according to the FBI, there are more false rape claims than false reports of any other crime.

That’s why normal people like to look at the facts. For example, how long did it take the alleged victim to report the rape? How sophisticated is she? Is the story plausible? Did the accuser have any other motive to cry rape? And is there any record of her begging the suspect to sodomize her?

Mattress Girl waited seven months to report her rape — even then, only to college administrators, not the police. In the intervening months, she strenuously, albeit unsuccessfully, pursued a relationship with her alleged rapist.

Rolling Stone’s “Jackie” never reported her apocryphal rape, explaining to The Washington Post that after allegedly being violently gang-raped, she was “unaware of the resources available to her.” (Heard of 911?)

By contrast, the 14-year-old girl in Maryland emerged from the bathroom stall and immediately reported her rape to the police.

According to the police report, she had run into her friend, 17-year-old Jose Montano, and his friend, 18-year-old Henry Sanchez-Milian, in a school hallway. (The 17- and 18-year-olds are both in the 9th grade. We really are getting the best illegal immigrants!) She knew Montano, but not Sanchez-Milian. Montano hugged her, slapped her buttocks and asked her to have sex with both men.

She says she said no — something generally missing from the corpus of cases making up the “campus rape epidemic.”

Montano and Sanchez-Milian then forced her into a boys’ bathroom, according to the report, where she grabbed the bathroom sink to stop them from dragging her into a stall, repeatedly saying “no.” In the stall, the illegals took turns holding her down, as they penetrated her orally, vaginally and anally. As she was screaming, they yelled at one another in Spanish.

Although there was no hard evidence, like the victim dragging a mattress around for a year, police investigators did find blood and semen in the bathroom stall.

If even one story on the left’s via dolorosa of campus rape had allegations like these, the accuser would be on a postage stamp, have laws named after her, and she’d be the one giving the State of the Union address. She’d be having lunch with Lena Dunham, Emma Watson would play her in the movie, and Lady Gaga would write a song about her.

Instead, because the accused rapists (“Dreamers,” as I call them) are illegal aliens, the media want to submit their names for sainthood. The prosecutor, Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy, wants to know how short the 14-year-old’s skirt was.

McCarthy dropped rape charges against both suspects, reportedly on the grounds that the girl had previously sent nude photos of herself to Montano. This, the prosecutor interpreted as consent to have multi-orifice sex in a bathroom stall with him, as well as any of his friends.

Can we get the pre-consent-by-text rule written into college guidelines on sexual assault?

However risque her texts were, can’t a girl change her mind? Evidently, she thought it was rape when she emerged from the bathroom, inasmuch as she promptly notified authorities. Isn’t it possible she also thought it was rape as it was happening, an hour or so earlier?

Mattress Girl was old enough to attend college, vote and buy a mattress, but it was rude to mention her text requests for anal sex and previous romps with the alleged rapist. Only when the accused is an illegal do the victim’s X-rated texts become binding consent to all forms of sex with the illegal — plus his friends.

There’s also the fact that she’s 14 years old! Her alleged rapists are 17 and 18. Under about 700 years of Anglo-Saxon law, that’s statutory rape. (Statute of Westminster of 1275.) Apparently, diversity — in addition to being a “strength” — requires us to jettison our statutory rape laws.

This is the case the media are howling with glee about — demanding that President Trump apologize for even mentioning it.

The New York Times and Washington Post both editorialized about Trump’s “reflexive immigrant-bashing” -– after first telling their readers about the alleged rape that neither paper had bothered reporting when it happened.

CNN — which also didn’t mention the Rockville case until charges were dropped — is in a state of high dudgeon at Trump for citing the rape.

Erin Burnett announced: “Tonight, the White House not backing down, refusing to retract its comments on an alleged rape case used — that they used as an example of why the United States should crack down on illegal immigration.”

Correspondent Ryan Nobles raged that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer referred to what happened to the 14-year-old girl as “tragedies like this.”

“Tragedies!” This milquetoast, boring American girl got to experience diversity, up close — vaginally, anally and orally — AND THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY CALLS THAT A “TRAGEDY”?

In multicultural America, sexually active college coeds are treated like naive 14-year-old girls, while naive 14-year-old girls are treated like hardened hussies — depending on who the accused rapist is. A “frat boy,” an athlete (black or white) or a white male: Always guilty, no due process allowed. Illegal aliens: She was asking for it.

SOURCE






Must not laugh at Leftist pieties

The modern-day equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition will get you if you do

Hypatia was a female mathematician and philosopher in 4th-century Egypt who was murdered by a Christian mob after being accused of stirring up conflict between the governor and bishop in Alexandria. Her death ‘effectively marked the downfall of Alexandrian intellectual life’, wrote Stephen Greenblatt in The Swerve.

Today, a female professor in Memphis, Tennessee, writing in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, has also been attacked by zealots, this time a mob of pro-trans women academics. Rebecca Tuvel has not suffered Hypatia’s fate (only perhaps the death of her career), but the controversy over her article certainly marks a new low in our intellectual life.

Tuvel had the temerity to consider whether there are similarities between the ‘transracialism’ of Rachel Dolezal (the white woman who identifies as black) and the transgenderism of Caitlyn Jenner. As we know, Jenner is celebrated, while Dolezal is dismissed as a kook. Tuvel’s question is actually one that many people have wondered about lately: if a man can ‘identify as’ a woman, then why can’t a white person ‘identify as’ black? Tuvel concludes: ‘Since we should accept transgender individuals’ decision to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decision to change races.’

For simply asking and answering such questions, Tuvel was greeted with what Jesse Singal, writing in New York magazine, calls ‘a massive internet witch-hunt’. Over 800 academics and others signed an ‘open letter to Hypatia’, calling for the article to be retracted, on the grounds that it causes ‘harm’ to marginalised people and reflects ‘white and cisgender privilege’. More piled on. Nora Berenstain, a philosophy professor at the University of Tennessee, complained that the article expressed ‘egregious levels of liberal white ignorance and discursive transmisogynistic violence’.

Tuvel says she has received hate mail, and much pressure to withdraw her essay. Rather than defend her, the associate editors of Hypatia quickly caved, extending a ‘profound apology’ for the ‘harms’ the article caused. ‘Clearly, the article should not have been published’, they wrote, sounding like the confessions extracted from prisoners in a Maoist re-education camp.

The Tuvel affair provides a window into the state of academic and intellectual life today, and it’s not a pretty sight. There are many worrying implications one can draw from this debacle, but I would highlight four points.

First, the response to Tuvel’s article makes clear that many feminist and pro-trans academics prefer to call out and censor rather than engage with arguments, like Tuvel’s, that might challenge their orthodoxies. Listen to Berenstain’s list of complaints: ‘Tuvel enacts violence and perpetuates harm in numerous ways throughout her essay. She deadnames a trans woman. She uses the term “transgenderism”. She talks about “biological sex” and uses phrases like “male genitalia”.’

Berenstain is not debating the substance of Tuvel’s ideas – she is simply declaring that certain words are taboo, and is mad that Tuvel crossed her line by using them. Her criticisms are full of jargon (‘deadnames’, ‘discursive transmisogynistic violence’), deployed to establish her authority as part of the in-group, the self-appointed high priestesses that get to determine what is acceptable. And, like many do today, she equates words with violence, in order to exaggerate the extent of harm caused.

Such criticisms have the aim of defining dogma, not engaging in intellectual debate. Tuvel says she hoped her questions would encourage discussion, but ‘calls for intellectual engagement are also being shut down because they “dignify” the article’. What this really shows is that the feminist/pro-trans types are defensive about their arguments – rather than trying to persuade, all they can do is try to shut down dissenting voices.

Second, the outrage expressed over Tuvel is consistent with other recent statements from professors in the US that seek to justify censorship. Certain faculty members at Middlebury College opposed Charles Murray’s recent appearance (including Michael Sheridan, the chair of the anthropology and sociology department, who admitted he had not read Murray’s book Coming Apart, but circulated ‘a devastating review in Salon’ of Murray’s earlier work to his colleagues). A group of professors at Wellesley sent an email to students recommending that controversial speakers like Laura Kipnis, who is critical of much feminist orthodoxy, no longer be invited to campus, because they enable ‘the bullying of disempowered groups’.

There is much consternation over student protesters who seek to shut down speakers (even as some surveys find a majority of students are in favour of free speech). But the pitchforks-and-torches response to Tuvel, and other calls for censorship on campus, are a useful reminder to focus on where the students get their ideas from – their professors.

Third, it should be recognised that the dispute over Tuvel’s article is very much an internal fight among today’s so-called progressives, a case of them directing fire on one of their own. On her Rhodes College faculty page, Tuvel describes her work as follows: ‘My research lies at the intersection of critical race, feminist and animal ethics. Throughout my research, I have considered several ways in which animals, women and racially subordinated groups are oppressed, how this oppression often overlaps, and how it serves to maintain erroneous and harmful conceptions of humanity.’ Obviously, such credentials were not good enough to ward off attacks; even believers must adhere to strict orthodoxy.

Both Tuvel and her critics are devotees of the concept of ‘intersectionality’, which examines social identities, like race, gender and sexual orientation, and how they intersect or overlap with one other. But this notion is inherently divisive. We see such divisions in practice, as different identities claim greater victimhood relative to others, a type of Oppression Olympics. Increasingly, trans concerns are trumping traditional feminism. For example, trans activists were critical of the recent March on Washington, saying the ‘pussyhats’ that protesters wore excluded women without vaginas.

It is important to note that the attacks on Tuvel are not simply academics acting boorishly and unprofessionally. Such tribal warfare is the logical outcome of the divisive ideas being put forward.

Fourth, and finally, it is the liberal-left that fuels the radical feminists and pro-trans types. For too long, the left has acted cowardly, too afraid of speaking out against the irrationalities and showtrials of the intersectionalists. They fear being called out as not supportive of certain groups, of hurting the feelings of some. They fear appearing as if they are on the same side as the right. Kelly Oliver, a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt University, writes that some colleagues were two-faced about Tuvel. In private messages she received, ‘people apologised for what [Tuvel] must be going through, while in public they fanned the flames of hatred and bile on social media’.

Writer Freddie deBoer finds his fellow lefties too wary to speak in public, and that means the problem is deeper than isolated cases like Tuvel’s. ‘For every one of these controversies that goes public, there are vastly more situations where someone self-censors, or is quietly bullied into acquiescing. For every odd example that goes viral, there is no doubt dozens more that occur behind closed doors.’

When the liberal-left do challenge restrictions on speech, it is too often to defend the ability of one of their own to speak, not freedom of speech for all. Viewing the Tuvel case, Suzanna Danuta Walters laments ‘academe’s poisonous call-out culture’. But what Walters really minds is that the outrage was targeted at a ‘feminist academic whose body of work is clearly on the side of progressive social justice’. Tuvel ‘is not [Ann] Coulter or [Charles] Murray or even the predictably contrarian Camille Paglia’. What she suggests is that it is fine to adopt censorship tactics towards the likes of Coulter, Murray and Paglia: ‘Let’s focus our animus on the real enemies of feminist, queer, marginalised lives.’

In the words of Nat Hentoff, this is free speech for me, but not for thee. As it happens, once you ditch the principle of free speech, you have no real defence when it becomes your turn to be censored.

The witch-hunting of Rebecca Tuvel is the real outrage, not her article. The mass pile-on and shutting down of her views is a shocking indication of the decline of our academic and intellectual culture. If we are to stop this creeping illiberalism, we need to challenge the ideas that give rise to it and justify it, and restore rational debate, which is where true philosophy can flourish.

SOURCE





British Police Break a Tradition To “Accommodate” Transgenders


Traditional helmets out

A British police force is replacing its traditional helmets with US-style baseball caps, which it says are cheaper, more comfortable and not ‘gender-based’.

Northamptonshire Police says it is ditching the world-famous custodian helmet in a bid to encourage more transgender officers to join the force.

The so-called ‘bump caps’ will be issued to both men and women officers, completely replacing the old headgear by next month.

A spokesman for the force said: ‘Not only will the new bump caps offer a better level of protection, the new headgear means that no longer will male and female officers be issued different headgear with varying safety ratings simply on the basis of gender.

SOURCE





Controversial bid to have gender-neutral bathrooms added to all Australian Federal Government buildings

Government branches will be introducing gender-neutral bathrooms following a push for equality from the Public Service Commission.

The liberal notion to include gender-neutral bathrooms is making a push in the nation's capital in Canberra, but some conservative MP's want to flush the idea, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

Conservative MP's have labelled the move as potentially 'uncomfortable' for workers but it hasn't stopped The Department of Environment and Energy implementing the move in Canberra.

The bathrooms have been slammed by some MP's claiming the extra money needed to install the 'inclusive' bathrooms could go to better use.

'This is just the latest example of the public service going into political correctness overdrive at taxpayers' expense,' Conservative Liberal senator Eric Abetz told the publication.

'Most Australians would expect the Treasury of all departments to focus on bringing down the debt, not finding creative ways of increasing expenditure within its own department.

In a further move to show the commitment to the controversial move the Treasury building will have the inclusive bathrooms installed.

The introduction of gender-neutral bathrooms won't be forced onto government departments, however they will be encouraged.

'Toilets that are specifically reserved as gender-neutral are not part of the scope of work for the Treasury building refit that is currently underway,' a spokesperson for the Australian Public Service Commission told the publication.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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