Discussion for article #224011
If you think I am gonna get in the middle of this, NO WAY. My momma didn’t raise no stupid children.
George, you’re on your own, dude.
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That hole not deep enough yet, George?
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I thought there was supposed to be a memo out there to the rwnj’s to quit talking about rape? Did George not get one?
Inquiring minds want to know…
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“Never argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” –Mark Twain
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What jumps out at me about this story is that Will called the statistics ‘preposterous’ without doing any research on his own. He relied on what all conservative white men seem to rely on for much of their opinions: the white man’s prerogative to take strong and loud opinions based on nothing more than gut instinct. The gut instinct that surely Iraq MUST have had something to do with 9/11, or, one of my favorite white conservative dude canards, “if we just stopped giving all that foreign aid we wouldn’t have a deficit”. The conservative white man believes as the superior being who was ordained by God himself to rule over the earth, he has a special genetic power to see truth without ever learning the actual facts of the matter.
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It is dangerous to reason with stupid people.
Sayings of the Don. Mario Puzo
I’ll jump in.
George, let’s put our old, male selves in the shoes of a female college student for a moment here.
Even if we take the lowest of the rape incident rates Dr. Gunter shared and even if we shove all the non-rape offenses into that [tasteless] broad-and-trivial category that you want to put them in so that those of us not named George Will will take rape as seriously as you do…then dealing with that broad-and-trivial crap and taking measures to reduce exposure to that broad-and-trivial crap makes life more burdensome and less pleasant for pretty much 100% of women – and there are still the 1 in 12 women who are getting raped (that’s the “serious” crime, remember?) in the late-teens or early-twenties.
So why are you acting like the world’s biggest butthole and complaining about too many reported offenses when the real problem is too many actual offenses?
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Of course, idiots like Will need a good thumping…
Makes me wonder if there are skeletons in George Will’s own closet that he is trying to run away from.
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This view would be relevant to Will’s claims if Will was quibbling over the numbers from this particular study and if there weren’t many others sources of information and data indicating similarly high rates of rape and other sexual offenses.
Some here (and I know that the same web-based survey is the source for one section):
http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/SV-DataSheet-a.pdf
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Will, like most conservatives, is a fact-free ideologue. If your ideology is true by definition, then facts that don’t comport with it are false, by definition. It only remains to deny the validity of any of those pesky facts either by discrediting the source or flatly stating contradictory lies. If you do the latter without blushing, it can be very effective (c.f., Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush).
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Thank you again Dr. Gunter.
You are a beacon of intelligent, thoughtful light shining brilliantly on a sad, seemingly intractable, misogynistic, self-serving, distortion of reality, thus exposing all of its ugly flaws.
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While George Will is a detestable ahole, he is right on the numbers. When matched up to actual reported rapes the statistics do not fit correctly. So the rape stats are wrong. And sexual assault is to broadly defined. It becomes meaningless when it covers non sexual offenses.
And using a web survey is just a bad way to get statistics like this.
And there is the history of organizations using false statistics about rape, especially when it comes to the likelihood that someone will commit another offense after being caught once. States have found the rate for reoffense is 5-10% which is lower than for any other crime.
Assuming these stats are reasonably accurate, how do we know if there’s any more or less of this ugly male behavior than there was at any other period – say, 1955, 1965 or 1975?
Whatever the numbers, it’s too many. I’m just wondering if the base numbers for any period are more or less than they are in this study.
Don’t know if there’s any numbers for comparison.
To me, harassment & sexual assault comes out of poor, or no male socialization. Nobody told these bozos that they would not want their moms, sisters, wives or girlfriends exposed to sexual assault.
That’s a bit misleading. For the vast majority of offenders who are apprehended and processed through the legal system and receive mandated sex-offender specific counseling that is an accurate reflection of the recidivism rate, but serial rapists and true pedophiles who have difficulty restraining their pedophilic impulses (not all true pedophiles commit offenses) the reoffense rate is much higher.
As for those offenders who are not apprehended and processed through the legal system, the numbers are harder to pin down, but there is significant reason to believe that a high percentage of them have multiple offenses until and unless they are apprehended and processed through the legal system.
The reason I keep using the phrase apprehended and processed through the legal system and receive mandated sex-offender specific counseling is because there is reason to believe that extra-judicial proceedings such as college tribunals, expulsions, private referrals to traditional (as differentiated from mandated, sex-offender specific) counseling, pastoral reassignment, etc., are frequently not effective in changing the belief systems and patterns of behavior which are at the root of sexually assaultive behavior.
edit: I should mention that not all offenders who molest children are true pedophiles. That label is widely and unfairly misapplied.
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The data indicated that 19% of women had either been the victim of an attempted or a completed sexual assault while in college, hence 1 in 5 women. Of this cohort 11.9 percent reported they were raped
If “this cohort” means the 19 percent in the previous sentence, 2.3 percent of the women in the study reported having been raped (11.9 percent of 19 percent). In the next paragraph 11.9 percent is compared to 7.5 percent of all women in another study who reported being raped between the ages of 18 and 24. These are completely different numbers. If you’re going to argue about statistics, don’t start by invalidating your whole premise by lousing up the arithmetic.
(This doesn’t even get into the validity of Web surveys.)
This makes me think about my parent’s generation, when the conversation was fairly open about who a woman wouldn’t want to sit next to at a dinner party because he would have his hand up her leg under the table. Of course, that wasn’t thought of as assault back then, just part of the way things were and something to put up with as the cost of good social standing.
But that was also 40-plus years ago. George Will needs to come into the late 20th century.
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The numbers that Mr. Will should be paying attention to are those cited here in refutation of his stances on rape (as well as other sensible treatments of rape).
He should also be paying attention to voter registration drives in states which are Red but nevetheless have sizable populations of blacks and latinos. This harks back to the Freedom Summer of 1964, in which voter registration was so much more dangerous and arduous than now.
If, in fact, people could find it within themselves to embrace this year with the enthusiasm and passion of Feeedom Summer, 1964, there would be a Democratic U.S. House of Representatives, a stronger Democratic U.S. Senate and some Republican governors knocked off as well.
George Will’s notion that he can say whatever he wants about rape (no matter how many women he insults) is born of the perception on his part that single women don’t really vote, and married and Republican women vote the same way as their men.
Voting counts. That is a fact that is strangely downplayed by about half the population under 40.
If people who like Hip Hop were suddenly converted into a subgroup in the United States with a 99.99% voter participation rate, Scott Walker would have already produced and starred in his own album.
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Please explain why your assertion is right and the defninitions adopted by expert working groups at the Centers for Disease Control are wrong.
Let me guess: because your definitinon was pulled out of your ass, it must smell sweet?
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