UVA and the alleged frat rape - Rolling Stone backpedals

What advocacy movement to you trust?

They are all suspect, because they are all fighting for scare resources -- media attention, government fundraising, donations, etc.

Look at the gay rights and AIDS advocacy movements. Now, both obviously have their merits, no denying that.

But the gay rights movement regularly pushed the idea that 10% of the general public is gay. Does anyone believe that? It went mostly without argument for decades.

And when AIDS first exploded among the homosexual community, and funding to fight the disease was not adequate -- perhaps in part because the victims of AIDS were easily demonized, as if they deserved it -- the AIDS advocacy movement pushed the heterosexual AIDS myth, and much of the media went along, despite little evidence to support it.

The idea was that we were all going to die of AIDS, that heterosexuals were -- or at least soon would be -- at equal risk of contracting the disease as homosexuals.

It wasn't true, and people that should have known better, didn't care:

 

To be clear, I don't have a problem with the victim advocacy movement, per se. I have a problem with it lying to me and misleading me about the extent of the problem, and that makes me distrustful. There are a finite number of resources - money, attention, and so forth - with which to tackle social injustices, or any other problems in our society. It's not unreasonable to want to know the actual extent of these problems, so as to make better decisions about where to most effectively allocate those finite resources. If I'm a college and I'm spending resources - state tax money - to address the problem of 1 in 5 women being raped, but the number is actually 1 in 100 or 1 in 150, then I'm wasting a lot of money that could be put to really good use.

 

"Making a difference" and "telling the truth" are not mutually exclusive.

 

You might be right about Jackie, but the most recent Washington Post article makes it look like she concocted the whole thing to fuck with Randall's emotions.

She might not have planned out the final chapter from the start, but she invented an admirer, and must have gotten a second phone -- or maybe just a texting app I suppose -- to create text conversations between herself and her admirer, and even between her admirer, and her friends.

So, maybe rape victim advocacy was not in the forefront of her mind when she set the events in motion.

But, it does seem like she is interested/involved in the movement, and that may even pre-date this incident. And, maybe something even happened to her earlier in life, in high school, or as a child.

So either she combined her two interests -- fucking with Randall, and rape victim advocacy -- into one giant scenario, or she just fell into it, and into the hands of victim advocates who eventually turned her over to Erdely. Hard to know at this point. And, sadly, it's why Jackie's past is going to be investigated, so we can better understand what happened.

 

If you can go out and find a handful of deplorable actions by fraternity brothers, and extrapolate that to vilify the entire Greek system, then how am I out of bounds?

Do I not have enough legitimate examples to suggest some broader problem within journalism, and not just a a couple of isolated incidents?

And, let's look at the biases of Rolling Stone.

If Jackie's tormenters had been some other group, and not rich, elitist, white men, do you think Rolling Stone would have checked out the story a little better.

If Erdely had said that as part of the initiation process to become a Congressional page, you are subjected to gang rape by Congressional leadership, I'm guessing they would have fact checked the story a little better.

If the setting was an majority African-American fraternity, I believe they would have fact checked the story better.

 

I remember in college, we were constantly worried about it. (Mid- to late-90s.)

Here's from the CDC:

http://www.healthline.com/health/hiv-aids/hiv-transmission-rates#Sex3

For insertive penile-vaginal sex, the risk is four out of 10,000 exposures.

In layman's terms, if a male has unprotected regular ol' sex with an HIV-positive woman, he has a 4 in 10,000 chance of becoming infected.

Less than two months ago, my best friend from college said to me - he's newly single and thinking about these things again - "there's just as much chance of catching HIV from a woman than if you're gay."

He believed this, whole-heartedly. He thought it was fact.

 

We had this discussion here a few years ago. Lots of folks -- I remember Drip specifically -- believed that a male having unprotected vaginal sex with a woman was at equal risk.

It's just insane to me. That was a "political" argument that became accepted as scientific fact by lots of smart people. And, it was completely untrue.

And, the folks making the argument knew it. And, the folks -- journalists -- who repeated it, should have known better. Some did, and didn't care. Others didn't care enough to know the truth, and besides, they were "making a difference" with their reporting.

 

Here's the previous discussion I referenced: http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/87933/

 

It's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

You're right, to a certain extent, that many journalists want to affect change and be an important voice in certain issues. Most journalists do this by reporting the truth. A very small minority of journalists would write 9,000 words about something they conjured out of thin air, just to push an agenda.

Reporters who worked for me made a huge difference in our communities, but not one of them lied or invented "facts" to fit the story they were "trying" to tell.

I was vilified here before for talking about replating a front page when my boss left for the night, after he explicitly ordered me to put a story on A1, because I felt, I KNEW, he was allowing his agenda to drive our content. Most journalists take that very, very seriously.

 

I had a really bad experience getting my espresso machine fixed once (this is actually true). Ergo:

Espresso repairmen don't want to fix espresso machines; to make it so they won't break again. They want to repair them just enough to keep you on the hook for more business, keep you feeling helpless when they break down, and demand you pay them overtime when they happen to break right before you have a big event. And, if their are some "abnormalities" in their repairs, so be it.

 

You spelled "mechanics" wrong.