In response to Tony though, chinese students don’t *just* learn english if they’re learning a foreign language. There are several chinese dialects that are popular and japanese is very commonly taught as well. English does have “soft power” but I think it’s pretty short sighted to assume school curricula are entirely swayed by that. To be fair, I think the Republic of China is probably way more well round than the People’s Republic of China is, in that regard.

Pete, you suck. Be more offensive, I dare you.

In response to Tony though, chinese students don’t *just* learn english if they’re learning a foreign language. There are several chinese dialects that are popular and japanese is very commonly taught as well. English does have “soft power” but I think it’s pretty short sighted to assume school curricula are entirely swayed by that. To be fair, I think the Republic of China is probably way more well round than the People’s Republic of China is, in that regard.

Pete, you suck. Be more offensive, I dare you.

CeCe is someone who fights for social change who even from jail has been urging her supporters to help other victims of white supremacy – including the family of Jaime Gonzalez, who was killed by the Texas police while he was at school.

I was with you until I read this. What happened to Gonzalez is tragic, but the police officers involved did absolutely nothing wrong. Are you really telling me you can tell the difference between these two images, instantly, while someone’s pointing a gun at you from down a hallway?

True… but you can make that argument *now*, and yet no one does. Also, men who claim they were raped by women get laughed at, by other men. I kind of think there will never be a huge number of men who will try to use “Actually, *she* raped *me” as a defense against accusations of rape. It’s hard enough for men who are *actually* raped by women to get justice, or even acknowledgement that what happened to them was a crime, from other men… you think a rapist is ever going to manage to convince a jury that he was the one who got raped?

Matlun:
That is perhaps a theoretically attractive argument, but any legal process needs to take into consideration the fact that false accusations are in fact made.

True. For example, I could accuse one of my employees of robbing me because I can’t find a valuable portable hard drive I brought to work, and it becomes a “he said she said” situation where there’s no actual evidence that the robbery even *happened*… and I have a reasonably good chance of getting that employee charged and maybe even convicted. This happens to maids all the time. Somehow, however, whenever anyone talks about the prosecution of robbery, it never becomes a huge big thing to say “but sometimes there are false accusations!”, even though in fact you can convict someone of robbery when you don’t have incontrovertible proof that anything was even stolen.

The legal process takes into account that false accusations can be made, for *all* crimes… but only for rape does it more or less assume that the likelihood of false accusation is equal or greater to the likelihood of the defendant’s guilt. This, despite the fact that there’s basically no benefit for crying rape whatsoever unless you were caught having sex and have someone in your life who might hurt or ostracize you if the sex was consensual. There’s a benefit to claiming theft — your insurance might cover the loss. But people don’t automatically assume that a person who claims her maid stole her jewelry is just saying so to get the insurance money.

I once claimed a woman stole my purse. It was true, which was why I said it. I had no physical evidence; I couldn’t even provide evidence I had ever owned the purse, aside from my word, because it was a gift from my mom and I had no receipts or anything. But the cops went out and arrested that woman on nothing other than my word that she stole my purse. Sure, she did in fact steal my purse… but since cops can’t read minds, if the lack of any physical evidence that a crime occurred means that we should assume that the accuser is lying, then shouldn’t the cops have assumed that I was just trying to get that woman in trouble and was maliciously lying about the theft? Plainly, that’s not what happened.

If we treated rape like we do other crimes, the “presumption of innocence” would not extend to presuming that the accuser is actually guilty of the crime of perjury and false accusation. We would assume that the word of the accuser that a crime occurred is in fact evidence that a crime occurred, and the accused would generally have to produce counter-evidence. It’s true that we will not convict someone in the absence of any evidence whatsoever (unless he’s black, or the cops hate him… but that’s not the topic here), but if you’re accused of any other crime, that *is* evidence of the crime. Only in rape is it assumed that most likely the accuser is lying.

Have signed petition and shared on fb, but not really sure whether responses from other countries help? Am in Aust. I would send an email to the prosecutor if I thought it would be effective from over here – do any people who do internet based organising have thoughts on this?

But there are murkier scenarios such as if CeCe stabbed Schmitz without Schmitz attacking her or her friends,

However, that’s clearly not the case. As has been stated by every reliable witness, Schmitz and his friends DID attack CeCe and her friends. Schmitz’s own brother-in-law said that Schmitz was known to engage in violent, racist behavior when he had been drinking. And CeCe had a golfball-sized swelling on her cheek from where the racist woman attacked her.

Whenever a police officer kills someone, we’re told that we “can’t understand what it’s like to have to make split-second decisions with life-or-death implications”. Yet CeCe was in exactly the same position. She was threatened and violently attacked. Regardless of whose hand was on the implement Schmitz (the guy with the swastika tattoo) was stabbed with, anything CeCe or her friends did was wholly defensive in nature.

Redlark addresses just this kind of skepticism in the article: We’ve been conditioned by the media all our lives to believe that the criminal justice system can adequately and fairly adjudicate this kind of question. What those who’ve been at its mercy understand, however, is that there’s nothing just about that system. It’s a direct outgrowth of the genocidal warriors of European conquest and the monstrous brutality of fugitive-slave catchers. The system is not broken in this case, rather it is doing precisely what it was set up to do: Maintain white supremacy and patriarchy at all costs.

The reason there’s a violent narrative about male sexuality is because when the topic of rape comes up, dudes invariably start complaining that the truly tragic side effect of rape culture is not rape but the fact that it puts men under suspicion, which is so utterly callous and insensitive that it proves that women need to protect themselves.

Matlun, in clinging to false rape accusations to prop up your argument, you’re looking more and more like nothing but a troll.