Thursday, September 27, 2018
Get 'em,Lindsey. Get 'em.
If you are tired of the Kavenaugh inquistion like I am then you are glad that Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said what he did. I know I am. The femocrats were going to drag this out until the November elections. Hopefully Graham put a stop to it. It may be a good idea to thank Graham for the position he took. I did and so can you. The more of us he hears from the better. To contact him click on his name.
Friday, September 21, 2018
Well well well how sweet it is
An eminent sociologist and high profile women’s rights campaigner has stepped down indefinitely from the board of a gender equality group following allegations of sexual harassment.
Michael Kimmel, distinguished professor of sociology at Stony Brook University in New York, has resigned from the board of Promundo, an initiative that promotes gender justice by engaging men and boys.
Kimmel, a vocal advocate for women’s rights and author of books including Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, also offered to defer the acceptance of a sociology award. He was due to receive the prestigious Jessie Bernard award from the American Sociological Association in recognition of his contribution to women’s equality studies. On Wednesday, ASA’s council voted unanimously to suspend delivery of the award.
In a message to members, ASA also said its working group on harassment, formed last year, will conduct a review of the organisation’s awards policies, nomination and appointment processes, and the process for reporting and responding to ethical violations.
The allegations against Kimmel were first reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which cited comments by a former graduate student. The former student, who asked to remain anonymous, said Kimmel had suggested they have sex six weeks into her graduate course, and later in her career. She added that he had complimented her appearance, and remarked that she would have to work hard to prove that she had reached her position as a result of her academic talents, and not because she was sleeping with someone.
Following the report, another former graduate student published a detailed account of their time working with Kimmel on the website Medium. Bethany Coston, now assistant professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, accused Kimmel of sexist behaviour, such as giving paid work to male students while women were expected to work for free. Coston also accused Kimmel of homophobic and transphobic attitudes, and of a lack of respect for anyone but cisgender heterosexual men.
Kimmel has worked as a consultant for charities and government bodies, as well as lecturing at hundreds of schools, colleges and universities, according to his website. In 2013 he founded the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook.
Promundo said that it was deeply disturbed by the allegations of sexual harassment, adding that it had accepted Kimmel’s temporary resignation from its board of directors.
“We fully appreciate the need to weigh due process along with all the shortcomings of formal sexual harassment complaint procedures and the power inequalities inherent to these processes,” the Promundo said in a statement. “What we can say is that all such allegations must be investigated, those harmed must be protected and supported and accountability and restorative justice must prevail.
Kimmel did not respond to the Guardian’s request for a comment, but said in a statement to the Chronicle of Higher Education: “... I have been informed that there are rumours circulating about my professional conduct that suggest I have behaved unethically. While nothing has been formally alleged to the best of my knowledge, I take such concerns seriously, and want to validate the voices of those who are making such claims. I want to hear those charges, hear those voices, and make amends to those who believe I have injured them.”
source
Michael Kimmel, distinguished professor of sociology at Stony Brook University in New York, has resigned from the board of Promundo, an initiative that promotes gender justice by engaging men and boys.
Kimmel, a vocal advocate for women’s rights and author of books including Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, also offered to defer the acceptance of a sociology award. He was due to receive the prestigious Jessie Bernard award from the American Sociological Association in recognition of his contribution to women’s equality studies. On Wednesday, ASA’s council voted unanimously to suspend delivery of the award.
In a message to members, ASA also said its working group on harassment, formed last year, will conduct a review of the organisation’s awards policies, nomination and appointment processes, and the process for reporting and responding to ethical violations.
The allegations against Kimmel were first reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which cited comments by a former graduate student. The former student, who asked to remain anonymous, said Kimmel had suggested they have sex six weeks into her graduate course, and later in her career. She added that he had complimented her appearance, and remarked that she would have to work hard to prove that she had reached her position as a result of her academic talents, and not because she was sleeping with someone.
Following the report, another former graduate student published a detailed account of their time working with Kimmel on the website Medium. Bethany Coston, now assistant professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, accused Kimmel of sexist behaviour, such as giving paid work to male students while women were expected to work for free. Coston also accused Kimmel of homophobic and transphobic attitudes, and of a lack of respect for anyone but cisgender heterosexual men.
Kimmel has worked as a consultant for charities and government bodies, as well as lecturing at hundreds of schools, colleges and universities, according to his website. In 2013 he founded the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook.
Promundo said that it was deeply disturbed by the allegations of sexual harassment, adding that it had accepted Kimmel’s temporary resignation from its board of directors.
“We fully appreciate the need to weigh due process along with all the shortcomings of formal sexual harassment complaint procedures and the power inequalities inherent to these processes,” the Promundo said in a statement. “What we can say is that all such allegations must be investigated, those harmed must be protected and supported and accountability and restorative justice must prevail.
Kimmel did not respond to the Guardian’s request for a comment, but said in a statement to the Chronicle of Higher Education: “... I have been informed that there are rumours circulating about my professional conduct that suggest I have behaved unethically. While nothing has been formally alleged to the best of my knowledge, I take such concerns seriously, and want to validate the voices of those who are making such claims. I want to hear those charges, hear those voices, and make amends to those who believe I have injured them.”
source
It's about time someone brought this up
'Believe Women' Is Perilous Baloney
By Michelle Malkin
September 19, 2018
I have a message for virtue-signaling men who've rushed to embrace #MeToo operatives hurling uncorroborated sexual assault allegations into the chaotic court of public opinion.
Stuff it.
Your blanket "Believe Women" bloviations are moral and intellectual abominations that insult every human being of sound mind and soul.Br
A certain class of never Trump-harumphers are leading the charge on behalf of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's memory-addled partisan accuser Christine Blasey Ford -- who cannot recall the year she was allegedly traumatized, where it happened, who threw the party that paralyzed her for nearly four decades, how many were in attendance during her claimed assault, how she got there or how she left.
No matter! Bush campaign hack-turned-ABC News analyst Matthew Dowd doesn't need any data to analyze. "Enough with the 'he said, she said'" storyline," he declared this week. "If this is he said, she said, then let's believe the she in these scenarios. She has nothing to gain, and everything to lose. For 250 years we have believed the he in these scenarios. Enough is enough."
Clinton/Kerry flack Peter Daou echoed the unthinking sentiment: "To everyone on the right who says I'm being selective, I BELIEVE WOMEN whether the accused is a Republican or Democrat. And yes, that includes all the names you're throwing at me. My default in these situations is to BELIEVE WOMEN."
Ivy League poobah Simon Hedlin asserted: "Accusers go public not because of any supposed benefits but despite the immense costs." He argued: "When somebody is credibly accused of sexual misconduct, the default should be to believe the accuser."
That is a dumb and dangerous default. The costly toll of "believing women," instead of believing evidence, can be seen in the hundreds and hundreds of cases recorded by the University of Michigan Law School's National Registry of Exonerations involving innocent men falsely accused of rape and rape/murders.
One of those men whose plight I've reported on for CRTV and my syndicated column, former Fort Worth police officer Brian Franklin, spent 21 years in prison of a life sentence after he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in 1995 who had committed perjury on the stand. Franklin vigilantly maintained his innocence, studied law in the prison library and won a reversal of his conviction in 2016. The jury took less than two hours to acquit him. But his name is still not clear. He recently submitted a 200-page application for a pardon for innocence and cannot do what he wants to do -- return to law enforcement -- unless the members of the Texas board of pardons and paroles (along with Texas constitutional conservatives who pay lip service to truth, justice and due process) do the right thing.
In Philadelphia, Anthony Wright also served more than two decades behind bars like Franklin. He was convicted in 1993 for a brutal rape and murder of an elderly woman. It was a female prosecutor, Bridget Kirn, who "failed to alert the Court or the jury to what she personally knew was the falsity of [police detectives'] testimony, or otherwise honor her ethical duty to correct it," according to Wright's lawyers with the Innocence Project. They have filed a lawsuit directly aimed at the prosecutor this week to hold her accountable for her criminal falsehoods.
And just this week, Oregonian Joshua Horner, serving a 50-year sentence for sexual abuse of a young girl, was exonerated after a dog that the accuser had claimed he shot dead was found alive. There had been no DNA, no corroborating witnesses and no other forensic evidence -- just the word of girl whose contradictions and memory problems were explained away as "post-traumatic stress" while an innocent man nearly drowned.
The idea that all women and girls must be telling the truth at all times about sexual assault allegations because they "have nothing to gain" is perilously detached from reality. Retired NYPD special victim squad detective John Savino, forensic scientist and criminal profiler of the Forensic Criminology Institute Brent Turvey, and forensic psychologist Aurelio Coronado Mares detail the myriad "prosocial" and "antisocial" lies people tell in their textbook, "False Allegations: Investigative and Forensic Issues in Fraudulent Reports of Crime."
"Prosocial deceptions" involve specific motives beneficial to both the deceiver and the deceived, including the incentives to "preserve the dignity of others"; to gain "financial benefit" for another; to protect a relationship; "ego-boosting or image protection [of others]"; and "protecting others from harm or consequence."
"Antisocial" lies involve selfish motives to "further a personal agenda at some cost to others," including "self-deception and rationalization to protect or boost self-esteem"; "enhance status or perception in the eyes of others"; "garner sympathy"; "avoid social stigma"; "conceal inadequacy, error, and culpability"; "avoid consequence"; and for "personal and/or material gain."
Let me repeat the themes of my work in this area for the past two years to counter the "Believe Women" baloney:
The role of the press should be verification, not validation.
Rape is a devastating crime. So is lying about it.
It's not victim-blaming to get to the bottom of the truth. It's liar-shaming.
Don't believe a gender. Believe evidence.
Source
By Michelle Malkin
September 19, 2018
I have a message for virtue-signaling men who've rushed to embrace #MeToo operatives hurling uncorroborated sexual assault allegations into the chaotic court of public opinion.
Stuff it.
Your blanket "Believe Women" bloviations are moral and intellectual abominations that insult every human being of sound mind and soul.Br
A certain class of never Trump-harumphers are leading the charge on behalf of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's memory-addled partisan accuser Christine Blasey Ford -- who cannot recall the year she was allegedly traumatized, where it happened, who threw the party that paralyzed her for nearly four decades, how many were in attendance during her claimed assault, how she got there or how she left.
No matter! Bush campaign hack-turned-ABC News analyst Matthew Dowd doesn't need any data to analyze. "Enough with the 'he said, she said'" storyline," he declared this week. "If this is he said, she said, then let's believe the she in these scenarios. She has nothing to gain, and everything to lose. For 250 years we have believed the he in these scenarios. Enough is enough."
Clinton/Kerry flack Peter Daou echoed the unthinking sentiment: "To everyone on the right who says I'm being selective, I BELIEVE WOMEN whether the accused is a Republican or Democrat. And yes, that includes all the names you're throwing at me. My default in these situations is to BELIEVE WOMEN."
Ivy League poobah Simon Hedlin asserted: "Accusers go public not because of any supposed benefits but despite the immense costs." He argued: "When somebody is credibly accused of sexual misconduct, the default should be to believe the accuser."
That is a dumb and dangerous default. The costly toll of "believing women," instead of believing evidence, can be seen in the hundreds and hundreds of cases recorded by the University of Michigan Law School's National Registry of Exonerations involving innocent men falsely accused of rape and rape/murders.
One of those men whose plight I've reported on for CRTV and my syndicated column, former Fort Worth police officer Brian Franklin, spent 21 years in prison of a life sentence after he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in 1995 who had committed perjury on the stand. Franklin vigilantly maintained his innocence, studied law in the prison library and won a reversal of his conviction in 2016. The jury took less than two hours to acquit him. But his name is still not clear. He recently submitted a 200-page application for a pardon for innocence and cannot do what he wants to do -- return to law enforcement -- unless the members of the Texas board of pardons and paroles (along with Texas constitutional conservatives who pay lip service to truth, justice and due process) do the right thing.
In Philadelphia, Anthony Wright also served more than two decades behind bars like Franklin. He was convicted in 1993 for a brutal rape and murder of an elderly woman. It was a female prosecutor, Bridget Kirn, who "failed to alert the Court or the jury to what she personally knew was the falsity of [police detectives'] testimony, or otherwise honor her ethical duty to correct it," according to Wright's lawyers with the Innocence Project. They have filed a lawsuit directly aimed at the prosecutor this week to hold her accountable for her criminal falsehoods.
And just this week, Oregonian Joshua Horner, serving a 50-year sentence for sexual abuse of a young girl, was exonerated after a dog that the accuser had claimed he shot dead was found alive. There had been no DNA, no corroborating witnesses and no other forensic evidence -- just the word of girl whose contradictions and memory problems were explained away as "post-traumatic stress" while an innocent man nearly drowned.
The idea that all women and girls must be telling the truth at all times about sexual assault allegations because they "have nothing to gain" is perilously detached from reality. Retired NYPD special victim squad detective John Savino, forensic scientist and criminal profiler of the Forensic Criminology Institute Brent Turvey, and forensic psychologist Aurelio Coronado Mares detail the myriad "prosocial" and "antisocial" lies people tell in their textbook, "False Allegations: Investigative and Forensic Issues in Fraudulent Reports of Crime."
"Prosocial deceptions" involve specific motives beneficial to both the deceiver and the deceived, including the incentives to "preserve the dignity of others"; to gain "financial benefit" for another; to protect a relationship; "ego-boosting or image protection [of others]"; and "protecting others from harm or consequence."
"Antisocial" lies involve selfish motives to "further a personal agenda at some cost to others," including "self-deception and rationalization to protect or boost self-esteem"; "enhance status or perception in the eyes of others"; "garner sympathy"; "avoid social stigma"; "conceal inadequacy, error, and culpability"; "avoid consequence"; and for "personal and/or material gain."
Let me repeat the themes of my work in this area for the past two years to counter the "Believe Women" baloney:
The role of the press should be verification, not validation.
Rape is a devastating crime. So is lying about it.
It's not victim-blaming to get to the bottom of the truth. It's liar-shaming.
Don't believe a gender. Believe evidence.
Source
Clarance Thomas sets them straight
Those words ring true today as they did back then. Brett Kavanaugh,like Clarence Thomas,has the feminist hit squad coming after him. Clarence Thomas told those feminist favoring "believe the woman" senators the truth. Too bad they didn't learn from it.
Thursday, September 6, 2018
Secretary of Education shuts down Obama's kangaroo courts
A judicial process that doesn’t allow the accused to cross-examine his accuser or reliably see the evidence against him is a civil libertarian’s nightmare. It traduces every principle of fairness and is blatantly un-American.
Yet Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is about to get savaged for replacing just such a process with something more in keeping with our longstanding legal norms.
The Education Department is preparing new rules that would roll back the monstrously unfair Obama-era requirements for how colleges handle sexual-assault and harassment allegations. It will be a significant advance for due process, which is almost as out of style on campus as free speech.
In one of its least defensible actions, the Obama administration used its Office for Civil Rights to impose its preferred procedures for handling sexual-assault cases on all the universities in the country that receive federal funds. It did it via a 19-page “Dear Colleague” letter, in the name of Title IX, the provision in federal law prohibiting sexual discrimination in education.
The process was terrible. It blew right by the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires public notice and comment before such rules go into effect. And the substance was worse. If the letter reads as if it was written by inflamed activists who had no interest in balanced proceedings, that’s because it was.
It required colleges to adopt a “preponderance of evidence” standard rather than a “clear and convincing” standard.
It more or less forbade colleges from allowing the cross-examination of accusers.
It adopted a remarkably broad definition of sexual harassment to include “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct of a sexual nature.”
The administration also encouraged the use of a “single investigator-adjudicator system,” i.e., one person as investigator, judge and jury.
The Obama rules are medieval in the sense that they ignore central developments in Anglo-American justice that arose hundreds of years ago.
In their important book “The Campus Rape Frenzy,” KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. describe how the rules often played out: “Start with an alcohol-soaked set of facts that no state’s criminal law would consider sexual assault. Add an incomplete ‘investigation,’ unfair procedures, and a disciplinary panel uninterested in evidence of innocence. Stir in a de facto presumption of guilt based on misguided Obama administration dictates, ideological zeal, and fear of bad publicity.”
The result has, inevitably, been jaw-dropping miscarriages of justice. Everyone should want perpetrators of sexual assault to be punished — and in the criminal-justice system, not just by colleges — but elementary protections for the accused can’t be discarded in the process.
One reason the Obama rules were so lopsided is that they were crafted in an atmosphere of moral panic. It was assumed that there was a spiraling epidemic of sexual assault on campus. Taylor and Johnson note, to the contrary, that sexual assaults of female college students dropped by more than half between 1997 and 2013, and that young women in college are less likely to be assaulted than those who are not in college.
The Obama rules have been receiving a battering in the courts, where due process is still taken seriously.
A US district court judge wrote in a 2016 ruling against Brandeis University: “If a college student is to be marked for life as a sexual predator, it is reasonable to require that he be provided a fair opportunity to defend himself and an impartial arbiter to make that decision. Put simply, a fair determination of the facts requires a fair process, not tilted to favor a particular outcome, and a fair and neutral fact-finder, not predisposed to reach a particular conclusion.”
This is the animating spirit behind the DeVos changes. They are still being formulated, but a New York Times report suggests that they will correct the worst excesses of the Obama rules and interject fairness into proceedings that were, shamefully, designed to lack it.
Source
Let's thank Betsy Devos: Betsy.Devos@ed.gov and let her know that what she is doing is fantastic and that we fully support it and her. The more of us they hear from the better so let's do it.
Yet Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is about to get savaged for replacing just such a process with something more in keeping with our longstanding legal norms.
The Education Department is preparing new rules that would roll back the monstrously unfair Obama-era requirements for how colleges handle sexual-assault and harassment allegations. It will be a significant advance for due process, which is almost as out of style on campus as free speech.
In one of its least defensible actions, the Obama administration used its Office for Civil Rights to impose its preferred procedures for handling sexual-assault cases on all the universities in the country that receive federal funds. It did it via a 19-page “Dear Colleague” letter, in the name of Title IX, the provision in federal law prohibiting sexual discrimination in education.
The process was terrible. It blew right by the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires public notice and comment before such rules go into effect. And the substance was worse. If the letter reads as if it was written by inflamed activists who had no interest in balanced proceedings, that’s because it was.
It required colleges to adopt a “preponderance of evidence” standard rather than a “clear and convincing” standard.
It more or less forbade colleges from allowing the cross-examination of accusers.
It adopted a remarkably broad definition of sexual harassment to include “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct of a sexual nature.”
The administration also encouraged the use of a “single investigator-adjudicator system,” i.e., one person as investigator, judge and jury.
The Obama rules are medieval in the sense that they ignore central developments in Anglo-American justice that arose hundreds of years ago.
In their important book “The Campus Rape Frenzy,” KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. describe how the rules often played out: “Start with an alcohol-soaked set of facts that no state’s criminal law would consider sexual assault. Add an incomplete ‘investigation,’ unfair procedures, and a disciplinary panel uninterested in evidence of innocence. Stir in a de facto presumption of guilt based on misguided Obama administration dictates, ideological zeal, and fear of bad publicity.”
The result has, inevitably, been jaw-dropping miscarriages of justice. Everyone should want perpetrators of sexual assault to be punished — and in the criminal-justice system, not just by colleges — but elementary protections for the accused can’t be discarded in the process.
One reason the Obama rules were so lopsided is that they were crafted in an atmosphere of moral panic. It was assumed that there was a spiraling epidemic of sexual assault on campus. Taylor and Johnson note, to the contrary, that sexual assaults of female college students dropped by more than half between 1997 and 2013, and that young women in college are less likely to be assaulted than those who are not in college.
The Obama rules have been receiving a battering in the courts, where due process is still taken seriously.
A US district court judge wrote in a 2016 ruling against Brandeis University: “If a college student is to be marked for life as a sexual predator, it is reasonable to require that he be provided a fair opportunity to defend himself and an impartial arbiter to make that decision. Put simply, a fair determination of the facts requires a fair process, not tilted to favor a particular outcome, and a fair and neutral fact-finder, not predisposed to reach a particular conclusion.”
This is the animating spirit behind the DeVos changes. They are still being formulated, but a New York Times report suggests that they will correct the worst excesses of the Obama rules and interject fairness into proceedings that were, shamefully, designed to lack it.
Source
Let's thank Betsy Devos: Betsy.Devos@ed.gov and let her know that what she is doing is fantastic and that we fully support it and her. The more of us they hear from the better so let's do it.
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