Doug has a post entitled Life: Inexcusable things men do to women — he’s pretty much dead on. Not really very many quibbles1, especially after he drops this paragraph:
Ladies: Keep the safety tips in mind. Definitely. When one of us insists that you have a male escort home, don’t tell us you’ll be fine, you just live around the corner. My ex-fiancee was raped walking home alone one night in college because she “just lived around the corner.” Carry and know how to use pepper spray. Hopefully, you’ll only need it for an occasional belligerent dog. Lock your doors, don’t take candy from strangers–follow all of that advice. It will help you. But the responsibility doesn’t end there…
Nick posted a fairly lengthy comment which pretty much rephrased what my argument has been for about four posts now, and managed to get someone who was decidedly Anti-Pete (and has now been banned for the site for doing stupid and immature things in the comments) to exclaim “lookie, lookie! Nick said it all! Sounds good to me!” — Nick’s conclusion was:
Guys: don’t rape. Rape is wrong.
Girls: don’t take unnecessary risks. Taking a risk doesn’t make the result your fault, but it does mean that you had a potential opportunity to prevent the result. Don’t become statistics - become active in your own safety.
Which sounds a whole lot like what I’ve been saying all along. With the possible exception that I wasn’t aware that to be anti-rape one had to be on-record specifically as saying that exact thing. My very first post contained the line “we should all take reasonable precautions to avoid being the victims of said crimes” and ended with “The problem isn’t the advocates for being careful, Grant, it’s the rapists,” which, honestly, is pretty much still the bottom line.
And maybe necessary is a bit of background — one of my pet peeves is the allegedly “feminist”2 notion that encouraging women to take precautions against rape is a chauvinist thing to do and is generally bad. Hell, Grant wasted no time in calling me the “most chauvinistic man [he has] ever met” — which further instilled my notion that this is that argument again. It’s interesting because it’s thought-tyranny like that that keeps us from being truly effective against such loaded crimes like rape. Intelligent people tend to be afraid of being called “chauvinist” or a “rapist” — even if the claims are meritless — because they understand the stigma that gets attached to those terms by a certain class of people. Same thing goes for being called “racist”. So it annoys me to see people tossing around words like that so nonchalantly because a) it’s a manipulative effort to try to scare someone off their opinion and b) it dilutes the term when it’s used in an appropriate manner.
I’m a little disappointed, because I thought Kristina and I (though definitely coming at things from different angles) were verging on a really interesting discussion when Grant decided to respond with a post full of ad hominem and strawmen and instead of just allowing him to go on his merry way tossing out potentially libelous statements, I decided to involve myself. This is generally how debates between Kristina and I go. We start off thinking the other is bat-shit crazy, but wind up not real far from the same spot, and understanding where the other is coming from. Generally the distance is a result of her being from the pinko-commie side of libertarianism and myself being from the fascist conservative side.
Anyway, I’d also like to point out that had Grant’s post been attributed as it should’ve been, I’d probably have given it much less thought. Some may think this next point is silly, but I think there’s a big difference between writing something like that yourself and reposting something you were forwarded in email.
Why? Because I don’t think someone has to fully believe something like that to repost it. As long as you agree with the general idea, that’s usually close enough. I like to see people say “well, I mostly agree, except” — but even when they don’t it’s hard for me to presume that when they’re quoting someone else’s work with which they agree fully (unless that’s expressly stated). This as compared with writing something original. I have a hard time, conversely, swallowing that someone does not believe, in full, something they wrote themselves.
In short, I think that scrutinizing and parsing first-party communications is a lot more important than second or third-party communications, because posting something someone else wrote activates our own self-interest to a much smaller degree and it’s likely that we’ve put less thought into that than we have something we wrote ourselves.
Maybe more interestingly, had the post been properly labeled as someone else’s work (an email forward or whatever) I think I’d still have linked to it, though likely more favorably, offering the caveat that I don’t really agree with the “instead of” provision because, at the end of the day, I agree with the general idea, even if I don’t agree with each line directly.
So if there are two lessons to be learned from this, one of them is “Don’t rape people” and the other one is “cite your sources”.
A third might be “words have meanings”, but I hardly expect most people who need to learn that lesson to pick up it until they get their exam grades back and find out just how important one or two words can be3.
So I’m really done with this topic until after the torts final. Unless I decide not to be, which I don’t think is likely unless there are new issues introduced, since I think these have all been settled on their merits.
So much for being sparse this week.
1 - Of course, he also calls violence against women “pervasive” and “systematic” — which I’m not sure I agree with literally, but we’ll just pretend like he said “wide-spread” or “common” and that should suffice. Heaven forbid I get into more arguments about what words mean. Of course, I’d be interested to hear the arguments that “pervasive” and “systemic” are the right words to use. Email is probably better for that, though. pholiday @ indiana.
2 - I say “allegedly” because I really don’t like to ascribe such patently stupid statements to a class whose stated aims I agree with. Even if many self-proclaimed feminists want superiority rather than equality, feminism in it’s pure form (as far as I can tell) is simply fighting for gender equality, and that’s a good thing.
3 - Not that I will do better than these people, of course, unless they’re in the bottom quartile… because that’s my goal. Then again, I’d guess most people in the bottom quartile probably have some sort of problem like that, because I don’t know 50 people who just haven’t been doing the work.
Nick needs a blog.
A scorpion was walking along the bank of a river, wondering how to get to the other side Suddenly he saw a fox. He asked the fox to take him on his back across the river. The fox said no, if I do that you’ll sting me, and I’ll drown. The scorpion assured him, if I did that, we’d both drown. So the fox thought about it and finally agreed. So the scorpion climbed up on his back, and the fox began to swim. But halfway across the river, the scorpion stung him. As the poison filled his veins, the fox turned to the scorpion and said why did you do that? Now you’ll drown too. I couldn’t help it, said the scorpion. It’s my nature.
I have actually had two blogs in the past. The first, Twilight of the Idols, dealt primarily with issues in education and still offers a much less polished version of my thoughts on such.
I quit writing TOTI not long after I was offered the opportunity to write for the Hoosier Review, where I became the token libertarian on an otherwise conservative blog. The archives for HR are broken (and they have been for years; I never knew how to fix that issue), but the search feature works fine. Terms like “libertarian” are likely to bring up posts I wrote - for example, this attempt at a libertarian argument against drug legalization.
Humorously, I was just speaking with Pete this evening about my incessant need to write and be read; it’s been nagging at me for some time. I’ll probably start up again in January - if I can hold out that long.
Be sure to share if, indeed, you do fall off the wagon….