Hype and Chains - The Hideous Duke Rape Hoax On the evening of...

Link: https://www.facebook.com/Hypenchains/posts/476851202423976

Bias in the Media

Another Karl at Patterico's Pontifications looks at "manufacturing dissent".

Why was the establishment media so slow to recognize the turnaround in the Iraq war? Why did they largely rush to judgment when the Duke lacrosse team members were accused of rape? Why did they get the Jena 6 case wrong? Why was the establishment media narrative about Hurricane Katrina built on myths, including grisly fables about violence and death in the Superdome? And why is the establishment media celebrating it?

These examples are but the tip of the establishment media's "faux news" iceberg. Folks on the far left probably have an entirely different list, but that is the point — the establishment media's center-left epistemic closure produces the same problems critics identify in the conservative media. That the critics are only concerned about closure in conservative media — and dismiss the theory that conservative media closure is partially caused by the establishment's marginalization of conservatives — suggests they are less interested in solutions than they are in further marginalizing the right.

As with the epistemic closure obsessives, don't hold your breath waiting for the center-left to consider that that their shrill stereotyping only adds to the problem. And as with the epistemic closure obsessives, the offense they give to everyone else is fueled in part by the double or triple standards at work. If you think the Ground Zero mosque is a bad idea (as I do), you are deemed a religious bigot, or are empowering religious bigots. In contrast, if you think Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptists protesting at military funerals (or Bill Keller setting up shop near Ground Zero) is a bad idea (as I do, for many of the same reasons), the center-left does not unleash the same gushing firehose of vitriol. When the passage of California's Proposition 8 caused people to engage in anti-Mormon protests and boycotts, and to practice the politics of personal destruction against Miss California, the center-left was not denouncing it as religious bigotry. And to bring it full circle, if the folks behind the Ground Zero mosque are not entirely gay-friendly, the center-left media ignores it.

The rape of a name

(Warning: Link above is to an MP3 file.)

Last week, Dennis Prager spent an hour discussing his thesis that "the rape of a name can be as bad, or worse, than actual rape of the body."

Of course, this round of that topic is in response to what happened to the Duke University Lacrosse players. Not only did their families have to spend significant chunks of their inheritances defending them from charges that turned out to be false, their names and faces were splashed all over the New York Times, and they were labeled rapists by the District Attorney and a piano-full of professors (eighty-eight kiesters) at Duke. Fortunately for them, the fact that they were found innocent (not just "not guilty") was also headline news.

Dennis comes to this sort of situation with a statement from Judaism: He who publically humiliates another is regarded the same as if he had shed that person's blood. In other words, to harm or destroy a person's reputation is the same as harming or destroying that person.

He spent an hour on this topic because he's gotten any number of e-mails differing with him. There are any number of people who, at least on first thinking about it, have decided being physically raped is worse than having one's name dragged through the mud. This is even true for some of his callers.

Then he started getting calls from people who have seen the aftereffects of both. One person cited the statistic that many women refuse to report their rapes, because the damage to their reputation is more painful. (This may not be entirely valid – a woman may reasonably decide ten units of pain is enough, and she doesn't want to face the eleventh.)

And then the most telling caller was a woman who had been raped, and later had been accused of molesting one of her children. She stated the rape of her name was much worse.

So, after all that, we get to the point I want to discuss. Dennis was quite puzzled that one's reputation had come to be held so lightly, when in the past it was known to be extremely important. I think he's missing a bit of historical perspective.

In the past, when just about everyone lived in small communities, everyone knew everyone else. Whatever you did followed you around, often for the rest of your life. If you screwed up, your only option was to hope you could "live it down" – spend the next however many years atoning, and particularly doing very much other than what you had done to earn your reputation, so that people would come to disregard your past.

You could, of course, pick up and move to another village, if you had the freedom to move from place to place (many people were bound to the land and not free to leave). You also had to be willing impoverish yourself (money existed, but most people didn't have any, and there were no banks, especially none with branches in other cities). In effect, you had to abandon your life in one village, and trek to another one where you wouldn't be known.

And since you were an unknown in the new village, you would be forever regarded with suspicion. The process of relocating was hard enough that people only did it for very pressing reasons – like escaping a major stain on their reputation. You could probably not count on living long enough to be an accepted member of your new community.

With increasing freedom of movement, and with the increasing ability to pick up and move from one place to another, it became easier to outrun a reputation. If a person had learned his lesson, and mended his ways, it was actually possible to sail to a new country, or drive to a new state, and start a new life. There were enough people around who had done just that to make any other person who did so – well, not that strange. (And in places like the Foreign Legion or California mining towns, everyone was from somewhere else.) It became possible to outrun a reputation.

Fast forward a few years, and we have the anonymity of the big city. In a small town of a few hundred, it's possible to know everyone personally. In a small town of a few thousand, it's conceivable that everyone will be known by reputation. In a city of a hundred thousand or a few million, forget it. Most of the people you run into in a big city will be strangers, and chances are, you'll never see them again. Your reputation is whatever you do in the seconds or minutes you're interacting. Reputation is something you share with a fraction of the people you meet.

To be sure, it's possible for someone to attain "repute". People can become famous, or infamous. Paris Hilton has a reputation, as does Kato Kaelin. (Remember him? I only remember him because he's in an ask.com spot.) Or, you can be made famous against your will, like the Duke Lacrosse Players.

Part of being a member of a Global Village is that any reputation you have, or any reputation that is created for you, can be spread far and wide, whether you want it so or not. In your preindustrial village, your reputation was based on what you did, and word of it spread to everyone, for good or for ill. But villagers had limited power to shape another's reputation. If someone made up lies about others, enough people would compare the stories with the actual facts to earn the storyteller the reputation of a gossip. There were some incentives to watch what you said about others.

But now, in the global village of the 21^st Century, our cultural institutions and our sensibilities have lagged behind our power to spread information. Anyone can say anything about some other person, and post it where a Google search will find it.

Now, the insult one school child posts about another in her MyFace blog will probably not be counted as highly significant by a prospective employer doing a Google search. But I guarantee those Lacrosse players will have the tale of their rape charges following them forever. Every time someone does a Google search on their names, that story will come up. Thousands of links will pop up.

To be sure, Mike Nifong is no longer an attorney, and he's likely to die in poverty after he loses the lawsuit from the families of the three players. His reputation is now carved in digital stone. But no one in the justice system is proposing that Crystal Mangum (Janette Rivers) suffer any sort of penalty for what she did.

Back in the days when reputations were harder to run away from, laws developed to help safeguard them. In Jewish law, for example, the penalty for bearing false witness (in court) was that the one bearing false witness would be sentenced to the penalty the subject of the falsehood would have gotten, had the lies been believed. Crystal Mangum should be sent to prison for the same length of time the Lacrosse players would have had to serve, had they been convicted. If she's suitably remorseful, maybe she could be allowed to serve those terms concurrently. But she did serious damage to the reputation of the three defendants, as well as to the rest of the Lacrosse team. She also did serious damage to the credibility of anyone who steps forward with an accusation of rape. Her case will now be cited as proof that women do, sometimes, lie about being raped.

We're in a culture now where we can't run away from a reputation any more, and our laws have to allow us to protect them, or else we'd better forget our cultural and evolutionary past and learn that reputations don't mean anything.

Liveblogging Nifong's hearing

The father of Townhall.com's Mary Katherine Ham is liveblogging the Duke Lacrosse Rape Trial.

Duke Conservative Union is "Watching"

(Hat tip: Power Line Blog)

The Duke Conservative Union has taken out an ad, chastising the 88 professors who didn't want to deal with little things like a presumption of innocense.

These radical professors exploited a tragic time in Duke's history for the advancement of their own political and social agenda, as seen in the "Social Disaster" advertisement of April 6, 2006 and in other inflammatory and divisive statements throughout the legal process. Today's advertisement was written as a tongue-in-cheek parody of the original Gang of 88 "Social Disaster" ad (found here).

However, the message is decidedly serious. The Duke Conservative Union expressly calls upon these professors, and the departments that signed on to the "Social Disaster" ad, to apologize.

According to the ad, they're "listening".

I hope they're not holding their breaths.

Durham blog

(Hat tip: Instapundit) This blog has been covering the Duke University Lacrosse players case rather closely.

More on the Duke Lacrosse case

It gets worse.

Mike Nifong faces disbarment and almost certainly a flurry of lawsuits over his negligent and malicious handling of the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape by a mentally unstable woman. He may not be the only one on the hot seat, however, as the Durham police department apparently also failed to follow its own procedures and imcompetently investigated the charges. Police chief Steve Chalmers will finally issue a report on how his department investigated the woman's allegations, and it appears he has much to defend:

After reading through the list of screw-ups by the police, it's hard to come to any conclusion except:

Nifong and the police weren't interested in justice. They just wanted a few Duke scalps to make themselves popular with the locals.

What an abject embarrassment the Durham justice system is. The state should take jurisdiction over the DA's office and the local police and start firing people until the message gets through to the rest.

Thomas Sowell on the Duke lacrosse team case

The larger tragedy is what this case revealed about the degeneration of our times and the hollowness of so many people in "responsible" positions in the media, in academia, and among those blacks so consumed by racial resentments and thirst for revenge that they are prepared to lash out at individuals who have done nothing to them and are guilty of no crime against anybody.

The haste and vehemence with which scores of Duke University professors publicly took sides against the students in this case is just one sign of how deep the moral dry rot goes, in even our most prestigious institutions.

Lacrosse feeding frenzy

From the Weekly Standard:

Mike Nifong's handling of the case was clearly outrageous. But he would probably not have gone so far, indeed would not have dared to go so far, had he not been egged on by two other groups that rushed just as quickly to judge the three accused young men guilty of gross and racially motivated carnal violence. Despite the repeated attempts by the three to clear themselves, a substantial and vocal percentage--about one-fifth--of the Duke University arts and sciences faculty and nearly all of the mainstream print media in America quickly organized themselves into a hanging party. Throughout the spring of 2006 and indeed well into the late summer, Nifong had the nearly unanimous backing of this country's (and especially Duke's) intellectual elite as he explored his lurid theories of sexual predation and racist stonewalling.

"They fed off each other," said Steven Baldwin, a Duke chemistry professor who finally broke his faculty colleagues' own wall of silence on October 24, publishing a letter in the Duke student newspaper, the Chronicle, denouncing his fellow professors for what he called their "shameful" treatment of Seligmann and Finnerty and rebuking the Duke administration for having "disowned its lacrosse-playing student athletes."

Rabinowitz on the Duke University case

The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz looks at the Duke University rape case. She brings her perspective from having examined a number of child abuse panics that didn't pan out.

Mr. Nifong is no anomaly--merely a product of the political times, a prosecutor who has absorbed all the clues about the sanctified status now accorded charges involving rape, child sex-abuse and accusations of racism. Which has in turn ensured their transformation into weapons of unequalled power. Like others before him, the DA quickly grasped the career possibilities open to him with such a case and proceeded accordingly--denouncing racism, and the rape and assault of a helpless black woman, and the Duke athletes guilty of these crimes in every media interview available to him (and they were many). For all the public shock and fury over his behavior, there is little that is new or strange about Mr. Nifong. We have seen the likes of this district attorney, uninterested in proofs of innocence, willing to suppress any he found, many times in the busy army of prosecutors claiming to have found evidence of rampant child abuse in nursery schools and other child-care centers around the country in the 1980s and throughout most of the '90s. They built case after headline-making case charging the mass molestation of small children, and managed to convict scores of innocent Americans on the basis of testimony no rational mind could credit. Law officers who regularly violated requirements of due process in their effort to obtain a conviction, they grasped the special advantage that was theirs: that for a prosecutor dealing with molestation, and wearing the mantle of avenger, there was no such thing as excess, no limits to what could be said of the accused. In court, rules could be bent, any charges presented, and nonexistent medical evidence proclaimed as proof positive of the accusation.

Indeed. I once described the child molestation trials as the Witch Trials of the 1990s. The Duke Lacrosse players' rape trial may be the Witch Trials of the 2000s. Let's hope this fad doesn't last the whole decade.

Rape at Duke University

The more I hear about the rape charges against the Lacrosse players at Duke University, the more they stink. Prosecutor Mike Nifong has engaged in very questionable practices, and seems to be facing some rather serious ethics charges. Who in his right mind would do this? Tomas Sowell points out:

Nifong's actions are inexplicable only if you assume that his purpose was to get at the truth about what actually happened at the party where the stripper claimed to have been raped.

...

His inflammatory outbursts against the Duke students in the media are not inexplicable. Neither was his failure to follow standard procedures in presenting the accuser with a lineup that included only white Duke lacrosse players.

Under Jewish law, a person who bore false witness against someone in court would receive the same punishment the defendant would have received, had the testimony been believed. Mike Nifong deserves to go to prison for the maximum term the Lacrosse players could have been sentenced to.

Instapundit on Nifong

And here's more on student and alumni reaction, from Joe Malchow. Malchow observes: "College administrators often speak of community. Isn’t it an essential part of community to defend one’s community against unfounded or overbroad attacks?" I don't think they're big on that.

And as it happens...

UPDATE: Hmm. Duke applications are down.

Sowell on Nifong

In his book "The Great Crash 1929," John Kenneth Galbraith said: "The worst continued to worsen." The same can be said of the Duke University "rape" case and District Attorney Michael Nifong. After all this time, it finally came out in court last week that the DNA samples collected from the underwear and private parts of the alleged victim contained DNA from other men -- but none from the Duke lacrosse players who were accused of raping her.