Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Well, fancy that...

Not having been a part of the dating game since about 2000, I appreciate that I'm out of touch with how students interact. I have to admit though that I'm entirely on the guy's side in this interaction:
Keenan herself, though, sometimes finds it hard not to go on the offensive. She’s so used to laying down the nitty-gritty details of consent that she's been known to open romantic interactions with a spiel that feels straight out of a student handbook.
She animatedly tells a story about a recent Tinder rendezvous: “One time, I agreed to meet with this guy at 8 or 9 at night. Before we met, I said to him, ‘This is the work I do, I know the chief of police ... so, don't try and get creepy; I know all my rights.’ And five minutes later, he was like, ‘Actually, I'm really not OK with how you just assume I'm a bad guy. And I get very bad vibes from that, so we shouldn't hang out anymore.’”
“I was in a rage. He was a total fuckboy about consent,” she said.
Consent is one thing, being told as an opening gambit that she has the chief of police on speed dial is another. Plus, compare and contrast this with this story, about a man expelled for campus rape.
A recent case at Washington and Lee University is emblematic. After a late-night party filled with the usual heavy drinking, the female accuser, Jane Doe, told her male companion: “I usually don’t have sex with someone I meet on the first night, but you are a really interesting guy.” Jane Doe began kissing John Doe, took off her clothes, and led John Doe to his bed, where she took off his clothes. They had intercourse. This was on February 8, 2014. (Jane later denied using that pick-up line on the ground that she often had sex someone she just met.) The next day, Jane Doe told a friend that she had had sex with John Doe and that she had “had a good time last night.” Over the next month, Jane and John Doe exchanged flirty texts and had intercourse again. Jane Doe attended several more parties at John Doe’s fraternity. At one of them Jane observed John kissing another female and left the party early, upset. John developed a publicly known relationship with that other female. Jane started psychological therapy after seeing John’s name on a list of applicants for a study-abroad program that she had also applied to. She told one of her therapists that she had “enjoyed the sexual intercourse” with John Doe, but was advised that her actions and positive feelings during their first sexual encounter “didn’t negate that it was sexual assault.” She told another therapist that “she had a strong physical reaction” to seeing John’s name on the study abroad list. Jane had also been working at a women’s clinic and attending lectures on sexual assault. During one of those talks, Washington and Lee’s Title IX officer informed the audience of the emerging consensus that “regret equals rape.” On October 30, after Jane Doe learned that John had been accepted to her study-abroad program, she decided to initiate her campus’s sexual assault machinery against him. After a travesty of a proceeding, in which the Title IX officer rejected John Doe’s request to consult a lawyer with the Dantesque warning “a lawyer can’t help you here,” the school expelled him on November 21.
In circumstances where you can be expelled for rape after consensual sex that only became non-consensual 8 months later, I'm amazed anyone at US universities sticks it anywhere ever.

Tuesday, October 06, 2015

Wait, what?

Quite apart from the historic inaccuracies identified by Tim Worstall in this letter from a Dr Gavin Lewis in Manchester (I do rather wonder what doctorate that is), what the hell this is supposed to mean?
In Jamaica, David Cameron “spoke of his pride that Britain had played a part in abolishing the ‘abhorrent’ trade” and therefore ruled out reparations. However, taking pride in outlawing something that shouldn’t have started in the first place is hardly sufficient. No one for instance would try to get away with taking pride in having outlawed murder and therefore suggesting that no compensation for this crime need take place.
Really? If murder had been an entirely legal and accepted custom for all of human history, and then one nation unilaterally made it illegal, and spent an enormous amount of time and money trying to stamp it out, that wouldn't be something to be proud of?

Monday, October 05, 2015

RIP Denis Healey

Definitely one of the good guys. Not sure about this though:
The death of Denis Healey on Saturday means much more than the passing of a grand old man of British politics. He was the last of the political generation that shaped post-war Britain, men and women who had not only lived through, and often fought in, the second world war, but who had also seen at first hand the terrible years of sustained depression of the 1920s and the 1930s.
Great man though he was, he wasn't the last of the breed. One of them is still an active Parliamentarian no less...