By now you’ve heard of Rolling stone’s UVA rape article, it’s retraction, and all the debate around it.

One of the interesting parts of the debate is this:

That was later downgraded to generally and most feminists haven’t gone quite that far, but the general trend from feminists has been that we should “believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says.”. The general tenor from the manosphere is that the default should be skeptism of rape claims given the amount of false rape claims. Both default belief and default skepticism have their proper time and place, it is situational. False rape claims do happen often enough to be worth considering them, but most rape claims are not false.

Generally default belief is best in the context of friendship, sympathy, support, and personal relationship. If a friend tells you of being raped, immediately believing and supporting her if she’s lying is low-cost, a few wasted hours at most, while not immediately doing so if she is not lying can be very damaging to her and to the relationship.

On the other hand, default skepticism is generally best in the context of law, informal punishment, or the impersonal. In these situations, immediately believing a lie will have immense negative effects on innocent parties, while not immediately believing the truth will be fairly low-cost as there will still be time to find the truth .

The tricky part is when the friendship and informal punishment overlap, ie. when you have friendships with both the accuser and the accused. In those cases, your best judgment on the characters of both parties combined with how close you are to each party is probably the best way to determine who you should default to believing.

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This brings me to another thought. Reading through the RS article there are a number of things that don’t pass the sniff test, but of all of them this one passage takes the cake:

Disoriented, Jackie burst out a side door, realized she was lost, and dialed a friend, screaming, “Something bad happened. I need you to come and find me!” Minutes later, her three best friends on campus – two boys and a girl (whose names are changed) – arrived to find Jackie on a nearby street corner, shaking. “What did they do to you? What did they make you do?” Jackie recalls her friend Randall demanding. Jackie shook her head and began to cry. The group looked at one another in a panic. They all knew about Jackie’s date; the Phi Kappa Psi house loomed behind them. “We have to get her to the hospital,” Randall said.

Their other two friends, however, weren’t convinced. “Is that such a good idea?” she recalls Cindy asking. “Her reputation will be shot for the next four years.” Andy seconded the opinion, adding that since he and Randall both planned to rush fraternities, they ought to think this through. The three friends launched into a heated discussion about the social price of reporting Jackie’s rape, while Jackie stood beside them, mute in her bloody dress, wishing only to go back to her dorm room and fall into a deep, forgetful sleep. Detached, Jackie listened as Cindy prevailed over the group: “She’s gonna be the girl who cried ‘rape,’ and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.”

The friends in question have since responded and have said that the night did not occur like that, because of course it didn’t because that kind of response is just absurd. But the absurdity of it is magnified by the fact that it was so widely believed, which is bewildering to me. It makes me wonder about the social lives of feminists though. How could someone possibly believe that three people called by a friend in trauma and wearing bloody clothing  would have their first thought be “but what about the keggers?”

I can not think of a single person I know whose first response to finding a friend who had been gang-raped wouldn’t be to provide comfort and aid the person (or possibly rage against the perpetrators). It’s hard to imagine anybody would respond like this, yet feminists and liberals all bought this incident as perfectly believable.

Is this how liberals, feminists, and their friends behave? Is this how people in their social circles act? Is this really a believable course of action to them? When they read this did they really think to themselves, ‘yeah, that’s how my friends would act‘?

If feminists really surround themselves with people like those in Jackie’s story, it’s no wonder they’re so screwed up. I’d feel pity for them if they weren’t so evil.

Maybe feminists should stop trying to dismantle the patriarchy and instead work on finding some better friends.

Or are they just so hatefully bitter that even if they know their friends wouldn’t act like that, they’d think everyone outside their bubble would?