The worst rape straw man argument

I was just reading over another generic Huffington Post link defending the claim that drunk sex is a form of rape, and I saw the same tired dodge that comes up whenever this claim is criticized.

Author James R. Marsh, who claims to be a lawyer, was responding to a piece defense attorney Matthew Kaiser wrote in TIME. Kaiser did a pretty good job of summing up why two drunk college students agreeing to have sex with one another should not be assumed to be a case where the male student raped the female student.

I say Marsh claims to be a lawyer because he made a strange criticism of Kaiser that the man provides legal counsel to people accused of crimes. Marsh does not seem to understand the notion of innocence until proven guilty or that the right to an attorney is extended to all people in America accused of crimes, even terrible crimes.

Kaiser, it should be noted, has built part of his career around profiting off of sexual predators. He solicits putative pedophiles and child molesters on his law firm's website... Kaiser sells his ability to protect the "good name" of people who watch, distribute, and produce child pornography. There is no evidence that his college client is different. Indeed, Kaiser never says his client didn't have sex with the victim. He instead makes the baffling claim that the rape (which he acknowledges happened) somehow doesn't count as rape.

I can understand a member of the general public being this clueless on legal philosophy, but not someone who introduces them self as an "internationally recognized lawyer."

But I do take Marsh's word for it that he was "baffled" by what Kaiser wrote. I think he is baffled a lot because he trots out the same tired cliche response that fails to address the criticism of the "consent" standard to separate sex from rape.

Specifically, Kaiser (and me, and many other people) are saying that it is not rape when two people choose to get intoxicated and then choose to have sex. Kaiser even took the time to clarify:

Of course, if someone has sex with an unconscious woman, that’s sexual assault. And if a woman is drunk and another person forces sex on her because she’s vulnerable because she’s drunk, that’s also rape.

But Marsh, like nearly every other "consent" defender I have witnessed, shot back with an oblivious statement. Early in the statement he acknowledged that Kaiser isn't saying that drunk women are free to be raped, but then later he went on to say just that:

Drinking does not mean someone is "asking" to be raped. Drinking does not make it okay to attack another person (something most men are perfectly capable of not doing). 

This is such a tired straw man argument. No one, absolutely no one, is saying that drunk or unconscious people are free to be attacked and raped. He is making a big leap of faith by calling wanted sexual activity enjoyed by a wide-awake person "rape" and describing it as an attack.

I see this exact same argument trotted out again and again when someone is asked to defend their position on consent, and it shows how weak their positions really is when they can't address the real arguments, like the idea that both partners would be considered both rapists and victims by their definition.

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George Will vs. The Liars

George Will said exactly what I've been saying for years. His opponents on the left found themselves unable to form an argument against what he said and are instead responding to a fictional argument.

Let's be clear. George Will wrote:

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.

His point is that to the left it is desirable to find a way to label oneself a victim. I have noticed this trend as well, and I think it partially explains why the left gets so upset when conservatives try to label themselves as victims. To the left, there is power in the victim label.

The usual suspects, writers for outlets such as Media Matters, the National Organization for Women and the Huffington Post can't touch that argument, so they wish to pretend that Will said people want to be victimized and become actual victims. They are trying to make it sound like he said people want to be raped.

It's a repeat of the Todd Akin fallout, but unlike Akin, Will had a good point. The statistics activists are the Democrat party are wallpapering the country with are fake. Will joined a growing list of people speaking out against overly-broad new definitions of rape, deceptively-worded surveys and the "consent" crusade that assumes all sex is rape until proven otherwise.

Honestly, it's hard to pretend to be too upset about this. I'm a big fan of George Will and I hate to hear lies told about him, but at the same time this fake outrage is downright boring. Modern feminists have created these phony scandals so many times that everything they're now saying is predictable and cliche. Dogs bark, cats meow and feminists scream "rape apologist."

I've never seen a group of people more eager to misunderstand their opponents than modern feminists.

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What is Elizabeth Warren's point?

The lefties on my radar were enthusiastic this past week about a stump speech on taxes from "consumer advocate" and 2012 senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Warren's statement, which can be read by clicking the image at the beginning of this post or heard in the video at the end, does a great job of dismantling an argument that no one is actually making.

If I find someone arguing that rich people shouldn't have to pay any taxes, I'll be sure to send them to Warren's Den of Intellectual Dishonesty. But as it stands, she is getting a lot of mileage with empty rhetoric.

From The Economist:

Of course, not unlike a tea-party Republican making the case for small government, Ms Warren paints in over-broad, simplifying strokes. It is not actually true that "the rest of us" paid for the roads, the education of workers, or police and fire protection. Some of us paid for them, and some of us paid a lot more than others. Rich people, for example, have paid and continue to pay more than the rest of us.

I hear on NPR almost every morning the debate phrased as "should the rich have to pay a little more." Did I just wake up in Estonia? We already have a progressive tax structure, where the rich pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes, but the left seems to forget that detail and acts as if taxes are flat.

I understand and respect the progressive tax viewpoint. Wealth brings diminishing returns to someone's quality of life. In effect, the rich can afford to lose a bigger percentage of their money. That's a reasonable position.

But just how unbalanced are they willing to make the tax structure? Is there a point where they will be satisfied the rich has paid enough? We want details, not vague hand waving. I understand there are many other types of federal taxes than income tax, but the rich are already paying more of the taxes than anyone else, and here's Elizabeth Warren acting like they don't pay any.

Warren's rhetoric is a cover to justify arguments that unchecked amounts of wealth belong to the government because the government made a limited contribution to its creation.

So not only did the rich help pay for it, they paid for more of it than anyone else.

Keep a big hunk of it? Just how much are we talking about? This is drivel, and I have no idea what she means by "pay forward for the next kid that comes along" either.

Everyone should pay taxes Liz, not just the rich, and for all the reasons you mentioned.


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