@ChaosEngine:
"The first 3 levels of sexual violence ALL involve no physical contact and are entirely verbal. "
100% fine with this. You can be a creepy sleazebag without touching someone and it's still not ok.

Perhaps you misunderstand. I also oppose verbal harassment and discrimination. I disagree with calling sexist and racist comments acts of violence. I agree with condemning them and acting to stop them.

Real world example, a Canadian student TA at Wilfred Laurier University played a short clip of a publicly broadcast debate over trans pronoun usage between 2 U of T professors in a class. She was brought into a meeting with 3 WLU staff who told her she was horribly wrong for doing so because playing that clip was "an act of violence" against any trans students in the room.

This abuse of language is manipulative and wrong.

I'm a man, and I'm not scared of being accused of sexual assault. None of my male friends are scared either.

With burden of proof I'm thinking beyond merely sexual assault. This already practice in forms in Canada. Ontario has an entire system of Social Justice Tribunals that run parallel to the criminal court system. It's been a gradual transformation of the civil court system, so civil and family courts are lumped in as tribunals now there. The specific one relevant in this case is the human rights tribunal. If the WLU faculty, or a student from the classroom, wanted to file a human rights complaint for the 'violence' they faced, the burden of proof would be a preponderance of the evidence rather than innocent until proven guilty. Which I can even understand in some cases, but lets not say that doesn't make people nervous about being falsely accused. That is not what scares people the most though in Ontario. The social justice tribunals have paid for legal representation for the accusers, and so the government foots the financial costs for the accuser. The accused however is on their own. The erosion of burden of proof and fear of financial damages from malicious or vengeful complaints is a very, very real thing in Canada. Accusations of sexual harassment being just one of many kinds of accusations that you can be damaged by while entirely innocent.

Lots of good comments here... this might take a while so bear with me.

@Mordhaus, I haven't read that book but I'd be interested to see his sources. Everything I've googled suggests the rate is really low.

As for Ford, obviously, I can't say for certain whether she is telling the truth. She may even believe she is telling the truth and still be wrong. I think she was entitled to the benefit of the doubt in terms of an investigation. Of course, it's possible she was doing this for political reasons, but that feels like a stretch to me.

@bcglorf
In some ways, I can understand the desire to remove the vexatious complaints cause. Coming forward with a report of sexual assault is traumatic enough already.
A) you may not be believed
B) even if you are, you're in for an experience many assault survivors have described as "being raped a second time"
If you add the possibility that your complaint could potentially get you sanctioned if no one believes you, that's a pretty awful situation to be in.

Now, I don't necessarily agree with this stance, but I can understand it. I think you would need to clear a very high bar to prove a complaint is malicious. Presumption of innocence applies to the complainant also.

"The first 3 levels of sexual violence ALL involve no physical contact and are entirely verbal. "
100% fine with this. You can be a creepy sleazebag without touching someone and it's still not ok.

"lots of people are very much arguing that lives should be destroyed then and there"
Sorry, I just don't see it. That said, if there are people arguing for that... I'm against them.

"We'll even right songs to laugh at them when they complain."
This song was mocking the bullshit "it's a scary time to be a man" line, and deservedly so. I'm a man, and I'm not scared of being accused of sexual assault. None of my male friends are scared either. But it fucking crushes my soul to think of how many of the women in my life have ACTUALLY experienced some form of sexual assault (and that's just the ones I know of).

@scheherazade
Completely agree that eyewitness testimony is borderline useless in terms of evidence. Go back through my comment history... you'll see I even said I doubt you could prove Kavanaugh's guilt. All I've ever said is that it warrants an investigation. (sidenote: I totally agree with @vil and @Mordhaus on this... polygraphs are junk science, but Kavanaugh's boorish behaviour should have been grounds not to confirm him).

Regarding your friend that was raped by a girl: that's awful, and yes, we really have to stop this childish attitude of somehow thinking female on male rape is either funny or that the guy was lucky. But it is unrelated to this discussion.

@MilkmanDan, I pretty much agree with everything you've said.

Being falsely accused of rape would be terrible, even if you weren't convicted. No disagreement there at all.

"Second, as I've pointed out before, the idea that we're seeing an epidemic of false accusations is not supported by evidence."

I am seeing a strong movement to demand that accusations be enough to get people suspended, expelled and fired though. The Canadian Federation of Students has been pushing a campaign to improve campus sexual assault policies. Their plan specifically includes things they don't want any policy to have, including any " SANCTIONS FOR VEXATIOUS, MALICIOUS OR FALSE COMPLAINTS". They sigh an example section from Dalhousie University's sexual assault policy that they believe is wrong and should be removed:
"A complaint made in bad faith shall constitute grounds for disciplinary action against the complainant, which shall be commenced in accordance with applicable disciplinary processes. A bad faith complaint is a complaint that is made with a conscious design to mislead or deceive, or with a malicious or fraudulent intent. "

More insidiously, strong movements across Canada are training the workplace on what sexual violence is. The first 3 levels of sexual violence ALL involve no physical contact and are entirely verbal. When people are manipulating language to make actions seem worse than they are, you are acting in bad faith and I think it should be called out.

" If a woman (or a man) comes forward with a claim of sexual assault, they are entitled to be taken seriously."

Agreed, but lots of people are very much arguing that lives should be destroyed then and there, just to be safe and/or to balance things out finally so men can be victimized too so they know how it feels. We'll even right songs to laugh at them when they complain.

IMO, the real issue here is one of deflection. Trump and his cronies
No disagreement there. I both vehemently disagree with virtually everything Trump says or does. At the same time, still don't like how far the condemn the accused pushes are looking to go.

Cohen and Manafort are convicted criminals now, and you still call this a witch hunt?

Are you truly this delusional or are you just malicious and deliberately lying?

Because it seems important to you to hear, yes, anything dealing with race is, by one definition, racist.

....but....

Just like discrimination, that's not necessarily bad.
Discrimination just means noticing a difference just like racism can mean making any distinction by race. Most definitions include prejudice and superiority as parts of racism, but not all. Discrimination by itself is not bad, it's discriminating against someone (especially based on racial assumptions) that's considered wrong.

Racism-the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race.

That characteristic could be nothing more than pigmentation levels, a physical characteristic with no other connotations or prejudices attached....it's still technically racism. E.g.. it's racist and discriminatory to state that Americans of African descent are at risk for sickle cell anemia, but not malicious or prejudicial.

People who claim to be 100% non-racist are liars, blind and deaf, or 100% brain dead. Reasonable people admit they see race, even those who don't discriminate against others based on race.

Short of looking at the cbc's coverge yourself I'm not sure how I can do much more to represent them. Here's a link to a podcast series they ran:

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcasts/boushie/

The victim was Colten Boushie and the farmer was Gerald Stanley, googling that and grabbing the CBC results will show you pretty quickly what their coverage looked like overall.

The case ended with a not-guilty verdict and the farmer is home now. Now, the only witnesses that were sober that day were the farmer and his son. What's worse 3 of the witnesses all changed their stories in court from what they originally told police because they 'didn't want to get into trouble'. With such poor witness testimony and no other evidence of malicious intent on the farmers part it's not much of a surprise that the defence's characterisation of a robbery that led to a tragic and fatal accident was considered credible.

Despite that, Canada's Indigenous services minister responded immediately to the verdict saying;
"We all have more to do to improve justice & fairness for Indigenous Canadians."

And our justice minister tweeted:
"My thoughts are with the family of Colton Boushie tonight. I truly feel your pain and I hear all of your voices. As a country we can and must do better - I am committed to working everyday to ensure justice for all Canadians."

As though the outcome was somehow dictated by race. This victimhood mentality just ignore the underlying real problem of horrible conditions on reserve. The judicial system didn't racially undermine the case, the real problem is a lot more complex than that and is being ignored because it's easier and more popular to ignore the root causes and just echo platitudes about how everything bad that happens down the road is racial too.

No comments? Seriously? How do you explain this away? Is the self proclaimed master negotiator really just an uneducated macho malicious wannabe dictator?

He is not clinically stupid and seems to have a limited set of social skills but he appears to be totally oblivious. He has the words (also a limited set), but he does not know things.

Which sane first world person could possibly consider the man in this video to be a viable community leader?

The only rational explanation I can come up with is that god has a sense of humour. Something is not right.

Perhaps my emphasis on the words "no one" was a bit much but while riding I'm much less trusting of driver behaviour than when I'm in my car because the outcome of a collision will greatly favour the driver. So yes, obviously you have to trust people to an extent but you have to keep aware of careless inattention, maliciousness, etc.

I've ridden for about 8 years now (for fitness/competition) and have seen and experienced some crazy shit where I ride (primarily rural roads, some small towns, etc). I will never forget the time an older gentleman waved me down for directions while I was riding. I cut my interval short, turned around, and helped point him in the right direction. As I resumed my ride, he blew by me without leaving me much room, startling me as I had let my guard down trusting that this guy was going to pass me safely. I was shocked.

So yeah, I'm very wary of all drivers when riding.

I 100% agree, but at some point it moves from acceptable to immoral, and that point varies. That's why I gave examples that I think many/most people would not consider rape (pretending you're rich), and what I suspect is its counterpart (pretending you're their partner).

Note that I'm not arguing whether or not this was rape, I'm just making the point that there's a valid argument to be made. I know that's cravenly copping out, but I'm not confident enough to make either case 100%.

I'm a follower of the George Carlin philosophy that says you can only take offense, you can't give it. i.e. offence is in the eye of the beholder, and so any judgement needs to take into account things like intention, and should err on the side of free speech. Any psychological attack - from being cut off when driving to being told you have cancer - will damage you only to the level that you let it (which is largely out of your own control), but that doesn't stop the source of the attack from being in the wrong.

This is why I looked at this case in cost-benefit terms. We can't know for sure how this affected those involved, but it's reasonable to suspect that the woman was psychologically scarred through little or no fault of her own, and sexual violation is one of the most cruel and personal. This is amplified by the public nature of it. Yes, maybe - hopefully - she chalked it down to a bad decision, but I think it would be completely understandable if she was significantly damaged by what was unarguably a malicious action against her (even if the malice wasn't directed towards her).

Although I don't know the specifics here, and I understand that ignorance of the law is not a valid defense, it seems flat out insane to criminally prosecute the guy.

I give him the benefit of the doubt that they are telling the truth and this at least started by bailing rainwater out of a boat. That's a very normal activity, no reason to presume that any harm could come of it.

Then, first bucket gets tossed in and he sees that big splash. It's Florida, so there could be lots of potential explanations. It might be bigass catfish. It might be alligators. Could even be dolphins, depending on where they are in Florida. ...And, it might be manatees, although that probably wouldn't be the first thing I would think of.

So, big splash. I'd be surprised. My first reaction would be: "I wonder if it will happen again after another bucket." NOT "Oh dear, perhaps I am frightening some poor defenseless little creatures and should immediately cease what I'm doing." If I came the the conclusion that it was gators (which seems more likely/reasonable than manatees to me, although I don't live there), it would even stand to reason that frightening them off would be a good thing to do -- encourage them to move away from populated areas.

Given all that, it seems very unlikely to me that the dude had any malicious intent. If he knew they were manatees and knew that stressing them out like that could negatively impact their health, perhaps punishment would be in order. But if he thought they were anything else (fish / gators / whatever), or just plain didn't know, continuing to bail the boat in an attempt to get whatever they might be to swim away seems like a very reasonable thing to do.

Educating people that "hey, if you see something like this happening, it might be manatees and you should try to avoid stressing them out" seems like by far a better and more rational option than "throw the animal torturer in the slammer!"

After investigating this further, it looks like they turned this on in the latest release because they were worried malicious code could be hidden in the embeds people try to post. The likelihood of this is extremely slim if you are just embedding stuff to sites like this from sites like youtube, etc. So I just used the command line to turn off the auditor for now.

@dag, the same thing is enabled in the beta I believe. Since you are on a mac, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't include the change since macs shouldn't be affected by malicious code in this fashion.

@newtboy

Tillman's words incited the incident, but it was his colleague's response, calling him a malicious liar, that started the fight and it was Tillman's ally in the senate who proposed the rule to protect him in the future.

The rule was made to protect Ben Tillman, who, among other things said:

"[We] agreed on on the policy of terrorizing the Negroes at the first opportunity by letting them provoke trouble and then having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable."

"The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again."

"We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores."

^--- This, I'd like to point out, is the guy @bobknight33 is effectively siding with. Rules that protect men like that should be followed, according to Bob.

Actually, it was created because a horrendously racist senator that advocated lynching from the Senate floor was maligning a Jr. senator for considering the annexation of the Philippines. The Jr. Senator heard, rushed to the floor, and accused the Sr Senator of telling "willful, malicious, and deliberate lies", and the Sr, Tillman, rose and attacked the younger Jr Senator violently ending in a brawl on the Senate floor.

..so technically, it was created to protect senators from the lies of racists....but it's now being used to protect and hide the racists' lies and actions.

Another rule that's a rule, when a law is routinely not enforced, it becomes legally invalid. This rule has been used once in over 100 years, and consistently ignored for the remainder of it's existence....so if the rules of the Senate are law, and I think they qualify, this one is no longer valid.

Well said, as always.

Every time I get pulled down the rabbit warren of despairing at the insanity of both the entrenched left and the entrenched right it's tough to pull back out and find a response other than attacking the malicious wrong mindedness. What I get pulled back to though, and your post reminded me of again is that the better response is to unite the middle. The response to birthers looking to build walls and ban muslims isn't to unite the left as a counter, but we should instead be uniting those of us in the middle. The response to safe spaces, rejection of dissenting opinions as 'triggering', and calls for vigilante rape-culture when faced with due process should not be met with the uniting the right as a counter, but uniting the middle.

If we unite the middle, we can tell both the extreme right and the extreme left exactly how disgusting the silent majority find their behaviours.

I 100% agree that not only is Bernie the better candidate and would make a better President than either Clinton or Trump, he would also have a better chance of beating Trump.

Republicans might not like Sanders on a political level ("ermahgerd, teh socialism is coming!", etc), but they DESPISE Clinton on a personal level.

And let's be honest, most of that has nothing to do with her real or perceived failings.. it's because
a) she's a woman and
b) she was married to Bill.

But that is irrelevant because Clinton is the candidate.

Addressing your other points:
"Trump is a womanizer / misogynist / predator. Yeah, and Clinton is married to a worse one who disgraced the Presidency while he was in office.

Trump lies constantly. As opposed to the Clintons, who would never lie. For example, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" (Bill), "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" (Bill)"

Sorry, I missed the part where Bill Clinton was the nominee. Leaving aside the dubious nature of the allegations against him, the point is that he's not the candidate, Hillary is.

The email thing was bad, but as has been gone over many times, it was stupid rather than malicious.

"Trump has no experience with government and would make an incompetent president. What's worse: a crooked / corrupt Washington insider that knows how to game the system, or someone with no experience?"

Easy, Trump is worse. When did we all decide that being able to make deals was a bad thing? That's what politics is. If you don't know the system, you will get railroaded.

Now, my preference would have been for someone who knows the system and wants to change it, but as that's not going to happen, I'll take someone who can get shit done over an inexperienced buffon any day.

Once again, I completely agree that Bernie would have stood a better chance than Hillary of being elected, but it pretty much doesn't matter anymore. Everyday that passes Trump slips further behind, giving me some small hope for humanity.
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/