It turns out that there’s been some problems in getting a handful of industrial grade neoconservative rape denialists and kool aid drinkers together to pretend to discuss ethics while slamming feminists and diversity initiatives in gaming and geek culture to a group of actual professional journalists.
Enjoy the schadenfreude sundae.
Here I have some exclusive footage, brought back in time, of the Airplay event.
Update: Koretzky responds to criticism from his move. And Campbell has now declared that he will not be attending entirely, which is a shame. Despite his penchant for melodrama, Campbell was by far heads and shoulders above the other panelists in terms of knowledge and passion for games, game journalisms, and the games industry as a whole. The rest are simply culture warriors who have found a sympathetic audience.
Update #2: Buzzfeed weighs in.
You don’t know me, but I know you. I was a staunch aGG supporter. Was. Up until I saw your post. Nothing crushes the spirit much like our side acting completely like useless children.
Good luck, but I think we’re going to lose because of people like you.
Oh, shit, I think this is a real guy. Fuck, this is really bad. We really screwed up on this one. This isn’t good at all. Shit!
Strange, it looks to me like it was published.
You probably won’t read this. Or you will, but won’t respond. Or you will respond, and we’ll continue this juvenile assumption of what will or won’t happen.
And so it was published. But the poster is kind of right. I mean, if you even go to the hangout it was an african american, an asian, and two women actually discussing ethics. And here is Damion failing at some basic fact checking and trying to whitewash them(Conservawash?).
Can we please stop being racist and sexist just to bring down shitlords? Thanks.
Three of the participants have little or no experience playing, making or reporting on games before last August.
The three female participants are, in fact, anti-feminists. Sommers in fact, invented her own brand of feminism (‘equity feminism’) simply so she could denounce mainstream feminism on Fox News and be counted as an erstwhile ally to the sorts of Mens Right’s Activists who like to engage in rape denialism. Oh, and the three female participants are also active in attempting (weakly) to refute the quickly growing mounds of evidence that campus rape is in fact a serious problem that requires addressing, which is the technical definition of rape denialist.
Five of the participants are people whose regular gigs are to report for very conservative news organizations (Breitbart) or write whitepapers for thinktanks (AEI) that reflect hardcore neoreactionary conservative responses to progressive concerns. As far as I know of, the left end of the spectrum, which GG keeps trying to convince me is where they reside, is nearly or entirely unrepresented.
One of them was exposed in the link update in breaking the rules of the debate as outlined by the moderator – pretty ballsy for a talk on ethics.
Being black, female or gay does not change the above facts, and pointing them out doesn’t make one racist or sexist.
There is NOTHING better than watching a white man wag his finger at a woman who’s been involved in the matter almost as long as he’s been ALIVE to tell her she’s feministing wrong.
When you claim to be a feminist, but then not only pooh pooh solid evidence of a public health epidemic targeting only women (which would be at crisis levels at even half of what modern research suggests) and then goes onto Fox News to suggest that nothing needs to be changed, and that other feminists should be ashamed for raising consciousness of the problem – then yeah, I have pretty much zero respect for how they are ‘feministing’.
OK, take the mounds of female feminists who have said the same thing as Damion, then?
CH Sommers is not a feminist in any modern definition of the word. I have not seen a single viewpoint she has ever expressed that even seems remotely feminist. Unsurprising, given her role as a AEI’s attack dog.
So, we have a ‘feminist’ whose model of ‘feminism’ is basically a finger wag towards actual feminists, being protected from finger wagging.
The irony there is enough to make a whole hordes worth of swordy’s and not-your-shieldy’s.
It’s so amusing to see you accuse others of being anti-science while willfully ignoring legitimate criticisms of studies that only try to verify results without making attempts to improve their accuracy.
You just have your favored studies that all have similar questions and just won’t even seriously consider that the NCVS is a more accurate survey. Nor will you even admit that you’ve conflated “rape” and a usage of “sexual assault” that without question goes well beyond it even so far as it actually describes illegal conduct.
Christina Sommers is absolutely, positively, 100% a rape denialist. To quote another.
You are also a rape denialist, in that you insist on using extremely bad data in order to create the idea that the data is showing something it is absolutely not about the preponderence of false accusations about rape, which is mindbogglingly rare, to create the sense that there is a widespread scourge of false rape reports that means that bitches who be complaining about being raped are probably lying when in truth, they most likely are not.
Both you and Sommers cherry-pick the fuck out of your data, ignore trends that come up in multiple data sources, and attempt to put forth different narratives (‘boys will be boys’ in her case, ‘bitches be crazy’ in yours) that try to minimize the impact of rape, date rape, sexual assault and attempted sexual assault in the lives of American women. Furthermore, you insist on ignoring studies that show redundancy of the problem. My sympathy for your arguments is roughly akin to your empathy for women – about zero.
You absolutely cannot respond to specific criticisms. You just say data that you don’t like is bad. You’d accuse RAINN of being rape denialists because they use BJS data that suggests that only 32% of rapes are reported and that there are ~300,000 instances per year.
You won’t even admit that you conflate rape and sexual assault even when studies clearly define them differently.
You just point to studies that you like, point to your own math, refuse to acknowledge that the % of false reports found by studies is actually the number of CLEARLY false reports, and that they don’t indicate the number of true reports. You are simply absolutely intellectually dishonest. You want to deligitimize criticisms that you don’t like so that you don’t have to specifically respond to them.
You poison debate. You’re intellectually dishonest, an enemy of free speech, and apparently a tacit supporter of those who seek to criminalize much of the normal sexual conduct on college campuses while congratulating yourself for being “sex positive.”
I suggested that the percentage of false rape reports to police could be anywhere between 2% to an extreme high of 40%. You just picked your favorite data that you don’t even understand and declared it the truth.
“You absolutely cannot respond to specific criticisms. ”
Does this mean you give up?
https://rainn.org/get-information/statistics/frequency-of-sexual-assault
Rape denialists.
Taking that as a yes.
You shouldn’t do that without a clear and unambiguous mutual understanding.
You seem to be under the impression that you can bring your toxic, poisonous MRA weak ass tea here and display it as fact, attempt to cloud the discussion by ignoring the data, create doubt where there’s not much, and use this in order to dismiss not only the prevalence of rape, but also the arguments against you. This makes you not only a rape denialist, but also intellectually dishonest as well.
RAINN’s work measures different things than the recent Washington Post study. Everyone who seriously examines the question of rape and sexual assault has been grappling with many mixed issues – different states define rape and sexual assault in different ways, many rapes go unreported, and many girls first coming into college may not realize that being taken advantage of while drunkenly incapacitated *is* technically a rape that they should not be expected to endure, and being penetrated by something other than a penis. By asking women if they had endured something that met the legal definition of a sexual assault, these studies hoped to shine a light on that gap. Everyone concerned is very clear and open about their methodology, and where the differences between studies lie. The studies are clear – when you expand the definition of sexual assault, you discover that there’s a whole bunch more going on in the grey areas which, if you are concerned about sexual violence against women, is of utmost concern. More devastating to your point, these studies are starting to replicate each other’s results.
Your attempt to stretch the numbers of how many of these rapes are false reports is without any sort of evidence, and requires enormous leaps of logic which you did not bother to provide. You are still left in a situation where there are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more rapes on our campus than there are false reports. You can’t refute my writeup from last time (or you would have effectively last time, rather than choke on your impotent rage), so you just handwave my examination of the data, and try to bullshit your way through it. In particular, the 40% number involved one police department, which means that researchers have concerns about both methodology of the survey, as well as behavior in and around this particular police department, and that number is a massive outlier from what other studies have shown. You ignore this because it doesn’t comport to your world view. For you to keep spreading your misogynistic filth which is actively harmful to the women in our society, it is necessary for you to look at the data in such a way where every statistic that is considered credible by social scientists interested in this subject is false, and that only the ones pimped by MRAs and charlatans such as Sommers and Young are true.
As long as you keep being intellectually dishonest and ignoring data that you don’t like to downplay the horrible impact of rape and sexual assault on our women, you are a rape denialist. As long as you keep trying to build the utterly absurd case that false accusations of rape are a significant problem, when they are orders of magnitude behind the human wreckage that is rape and sexual assault in this country, you are part of the problem. You don’t like me for saying that — your opinions on these matters have shown that there’s not a good reason for me to give a rats ass about your opinions.
In short, I’m not willing to let my personal blog become a search result for rape denialism. You want to keep bringing your without any sort of actual evidence, too bad, because it has no home on this blog.
Hear, hear!
So, when are you going to admit that the 2-8% statistic is based on a methodology guaranteed to undercount false reports?
The 8+% statistic (including the 40% outlier) are based on methodologies which is guarunteed to overcount false reports because they don’t successfully weed out ‘false reports’ that turn out to be reports the woman was pressured into recanting, either by the abuser, by the team’s football coach, by the police department trying to protect the good ol’ boy network, or by prosecutors nervous that losing a ‘he said-she said’ case will drag down their averages. This number is a black number currently, but is probably far larger than what you describe.
At any rate, you still haven’t addressed the core issue, which is: we know that way more women are raped in their lifetimes than we should be comfortable with. We know that even MORE women undergo experiences that are legally and technically rape or sexual assault, but don’t self-classify them as such. We know that the rapists that are doing this are a relatively small number of rapists, with the average campus rapist averaging about 5.8 victims, so we also know that it really is ‘not all men’ – it’s a sliver of them. On the flip side, we also know that sexual assault rates in the US are among the highest in the first world (last I checked, we lagged behind Sweden, and that’s about it).
We also know that, due to the sheer number of sexual assaults that are not reported, even if you went up to 40% (which is again, an absurd outlier with no supporting evidence), you would still have a difference between the number of women who are actually raped, and the number of false reports, that is seperated by at least an order of magnitude. And that’s looking at the most favorable numbers imaginable (the crappy 40% study, the pre-washington post studies). Looking at the most recent data – which most social scientists not trying to get speaking gigs on Fox have examined and tacitly accepted while working to replicate and finetune their results in additional studies – and that difference becomes MULTIPLE orders of magnitude.
Or admit that there is genuine confusion among students and activists about the level of drunkenness necessary to render one incapable of giving legal consent?
Or admit that the study that you are promoting doesn’t only ask questions about activities that meet the legal definition of sexual assault?
I mean, do you understand that to address my criticisms you have to actually engage with details and not just rely on broad proclamations?
Yes, there’s genuine confusion! That’s why feminists are attempting to engage in educating students about what the law says, and the importance of consent! This is ACTIVELY WHAT SOMMERS AND YOUNG ARE ATTEMPTING TO SHORT CIRCUIT by saying ‘naw, everything’s fine. boys will be boys!’
I’ve broken out crunchy math in the past to show you how your criticisms regarding false rape reporting is ludicrous. In return, you’ve presented nothing but a series of MRA talking points that, once actually held face to face with the actual data and the details behind these studies, melts into incoherent goo.
Dig that hole, Minardi. Dig it deep.
John, you’re welcome to help him out.
You can’t confidently say that 92-98% of reports are true if only 6% get prosecuted and 4% lead to convictions. There’s simply too much going on in there to definitively rely on any number. Yes, the scenario you included would lead to some overcounting. There’s still plenty of undercounting that cannot be reliably quantified. There are plenty of reasons that a true claim will not make it through. The number of actually false claims is virtually unknowable.
The math you showed me was mostly garbage based on the 2-8% underrepresentation and only focused on false reports made to police. I’m not suggesting any specific number. There are plenty of reasons that a true claim will not make it through. The number of actually false claims is virtually unknowable.
If you think confusion only runs in one direction, you’re deluded. Too drunk to drive is not too drunk to consent, despite what Laci Green and several others suggest.
Also, see how many states you can find where “forced kissing” (whatever that actually means) is a crime, let alone a sex crime, and not simply a tort. Guys shouldn’t do it, but they should be slapped, not kicked out of school or thrown in jail. If this is a study to inform campus adjudications or criminal justice reform, it’s garbage. If it’s just to push change in social mores, then feel free to shame douche bros who think that every woman wants to kiss them. Just, you know, but that on a separate survey so it can’t inflate the total number.
Also, check your links. The writer you quoted to support your belief that Sommers is a rape denialist basically admitted in his follow-up that her factual concerns were reasonable and that he ultimately took the CDC study with a grain of salt, as any sensible person should.
As for what I should be focused on? I want police to more adequately investigate rape allegations. I want women to feel confident coming forward. I want adequate support for victims. I don’t want affirmative consent laws that would violate every standard of due process if they were applied in a criminal context. I don’t want a media that seems fixated on promoting only the most dubious accusations of sexual assault, nor do I want people to be shamed for doubting genuinely dubious media reporting.
I’m not a rape denialist. I’m not a rape apologist. I want accurate statistics, proper interpretation of study results, robust debate without vitriol, and proper remedies that don’t undermine due process.
If all you want to bring is “any number is too high,” then you still shouldn’t support affirmative consent laws, condone misinformation about the relationship between drunkenness and legal capacity, or shame people who want adequate protections for the accused in campus administrative proceedings.
While, what policy is there that you think I should support that I don’t? I don’t know if you support the things I don’t like, but you are quite the apologist for those who do. And dubious statistics are their empowerment.
@Damion Schubert .Some notes about Sweden. Since this country have the highest equity in the world, authorities that take sexual violence pretty seriously and a lesser blame the victim mentality than anywhere else, we can except a higher proportion of reported crimes than in countries were the culture and the authorities make it hard for the victims.
This is also useful to note that Sweden count each incident as a crime, not just the number of victims. Since sexual crime have a tendency to involve people that know each others and often feature widely unequal “actors” (enough that the aggressor think he is safe from denunciation), is it not unlikely that a victim suffers from many aggressions. It can go into dozens or hundreds of incidents for some victims; in other countries, it would be counted as one crime.
That lampshades what I find the most disturbing about rape apologists and rape denialists: they create a vicious circle where the victims aren’t heard by the authorities, victims learn that there is nothing they can do and everyone think that the lack of reported case mean there is no problem at all.
“You can’t confidently say that 92-98% of reports are true if only 6% get prosecuted and 4% lead to convictions. ”
Sex crimes are hard to prosecute for reasons that have nothing to do with the frequency of sex crimes.
Thanks, John, for pointing out something that I explicitly acknowledged.
And let’s make this clear: the “core issue” isn’t whether there is any number of rapes that I’m “comfortable with.” There is a lot of violent crime. Lots of simple assault. Lots of aggravated assault. Lots of sexual assault.
I objected initially to your calling Adrian a “rape apologist” because he merely stated the crime levels are the opposite of an epidemic. I’m not a murder denialist or an assault denialist if I acknowledge that while there are still hundreds of thousands of aggravated assaults, and thousands of murders, they are going down, and we are not in the midst of a crime epidemic.
You can skirt around factual issues all you want. I’m not a rape denialist or apologist just because you don’t like my focus on preserving due process while promoting effective rape prevention strategies. If you can’t definitively refute my factual claims, and you have not, you are still free to disagree with me.
Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young are not trying to prevent anyone from being educated about the law or about what legal consent is. If you were to make the accusation with more specificity they’d have cause for legal action against you. Many activists are trying to redefine consent. They are misinforming people about the legal standard. You don’t give me confidence that you’ve bothered to research the legal standards for consent, either.
For those who think that Daniel is pulling shit out of his ass re: Adrian, it’s in response to a response to him posting the following.
This is a cute word game on Adrian’s part, and is roughly akin to arguing that the Holocaust didn’t decimate the jewish population because it didn’t kill exactly one-tenth of the Jewish population of Europe. Common usage of epidemic is one that describes a huge public health crisis, and if we were in a world where previously 1 in 4 people had caught the Black Plague, but we had managed to get that number down to 1 in 5, we would still be describing ourselves in the grip of an epidemic.
Which is where we are at. While stats for sexual assault have fallen worldwide since the 1990s, recent studies show that the very high stats of women experiencing rape, sexual assault, assault while intoxicated beyond consent or attempted sexual assault to be still at a ghastly high percent. We have a public health crisis in terms of sexual assault in this country and Adrian (and you) attempted to minimize it by playing semantic word games. I’m pretty comfortable calling that rape denialism.
Yes, Sommers and Young are ACTIVELY trying to prevent education of the law. They are pooh-poohing sexual assault while intoxicated as young kids having fun – sorry, but the law does in fact require consent while intoxicated, and an unconscious girl with her head in the toilet is not in fact a free pass. They are attempting to denigrate mattress girl with little or no evidence, and trying to use that and other cherrypicked cases of examples to create an aura that sexual assault is overreported (instead of underreported) and that false accusations are common (instead of very rare). So yeah, I have more respect for my dog’s understanding of feminism and the issues of campus rape than I do for them, or judging from the bullshit you choose to parrot uncritically, than I do for your thoughts on the matter.
Being a literalist isn’t being a denialist nor an apologist. It’s at most being a mild asshole. You’ll always find people who believe that we’re in some form of crime wave or another even while numbers are going down. I’m sure you’ll find people who believe that about murder, sexual assault, robbery, domestic violence, or any other violent crime. Pointing out that numbers are going down to contradict someone whose language evokes a worsening problem is not denial in any sense of the word. Even pointing out that the Jewish population was not decimated is not denial – it’s just being an asshole. Being correct is not being in denial.
As for your characterizations of the positions of me, Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young, and countless others. I believe you are either willfully dishonest, willfully ignorant, or just lack reading comprehension. Keep skirting libel if you like.
Your characterization of their advocacy is that heavily drunk or passed out = dtf = implicit consent.
Instead, our advocacy is this:
You are still legally capable of consent while heavily intoxicated. Consent is legally possible until you are wholly insensible. If you can’t remember what you did the night before, it doesn’t mean that you were not active or that you were not capable of consent whenever you did whatever you did. You are legally responsible for what you actively participate in. You are not legally responsible for what someone does to you without your participation.
You are legally responsible for rape even if you are heavily intoxicated, and you are legally responsible for mutual sexual activity such that neither party is guilty of rape.
I have pointed to at least one popular internet sex educator with 1.3 million subscribers who misinforms people about the legal capacity to consent while heavily intoxicated – it’s the https://youtu.be/TD2EooMhqRI?t=214. Her consent video has over 2 million views. I’ve seen countless feminist blogs that misinform about legal capacity to consent while intoxicated. Countless quotes from campus activists that misinform people about their legal capacity to consent while intoxicated. Campus posters that misinform people about their legal capacity to consent while heavily intoxicated.
So, the 3rd position is apparently that some indeterminate level of intoxication, even while still responsive, capable of communicating, and active, renders one legally incapable of giving consent. This is simply wrong.
I would suggest that there is essentially no one with legal understanding 1. I wouldn’t be surprised if less than half have correct legal understanding 2, and my observations suggest to me that half or more have incorrect legal understanding 3.
However, I suspect that you would ignore all this and simply skip to a statement that makes a decent point without refuting mine: women don’t simply have impaired judgment while heavily intoxicated, they are then less capable of physically resisting or making their verbal resistance firm and clear, and are thus more vulnerable to rape. And that’s certainly true. Educating people about binge drinking isn’t just preventing regrettable hook-ups, it is real rape prevention. People are responsible for rapes they commit when their judgment is impaired, and they are responsible for the sexual activity they mutually participate in when their judgment is impaired.
This misunderstanding has an impact on survey results. I can’t imagine anyone who believes she had sexual acts committed on her while she was passed out that would answer “No” to the questions on the NCVS. I am confident that the Washington Post survey had several false positives from people who didn’t know what “unable to consent because you were drunk” meant.
Being a literalist in order to downplay very real stats showing a serious public health crisis does.
The survey in question asked specifically if the questioned person was “happens when a person is unable to consent to it or stop it from happening because they were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out from alcohol, drugs, or medications.” So yeah, the survey in question makes it clear that what is considered ‘too drunk to fuck’ is something that any thinking person should think is not fucking cool.
In short, despite my warning, you are continuing to pollute my blog with misinformation and a distortion of the facts. You are not capable of being honest and transparent with the facts, and you continue to willfully cherrypick critics while still dodging the fact that you (as well as Sommers and Young) are drastically trying to undersell the frequency that sexual assault happens in this country, and oversell the frequency of false reports of rape.
I’ve warned you in the past about this. I’ve had several people reach out to me privately about your antics. I’m currently shipping a video game, and don’t have time to babysit and cajole you. Your opinions on this topic are no longer welcome on this blog, and if you post more on this topic, they’ll be deleted. Take it to r/redpill.
As you can see, Schubert shuns argument and stifles any criticism, demonstrated by this comment thread.
But for real, it’s amazing that this argument is happening HERE. Between THESE participants. Where it’s not only purely for performance’s sake but useless besides. Is Mabarcani going to give way? Will Schubert? It doesn’t matter, because in neither case will anything actually have changed or been decided, because this entire ‘debate’ (+80″”) has to do with something pretty far removed from complaints on a blog.
We have lost a powerful ally today.
What will we do? I’m going to go cry in a corner for a little.
We go way back, 3D0-days… M:TG at Cliffside Cafe (Pacific) days… So please know this comes from of place of love and admiration: Damion, you be trollin’.
Just a tad.
You got me good, too. I clicked expecting an article on [Small World (Troll Lair Placement)] Stratgy.
http://www.daysofwonder.com/smallworld/en/