{"id":3458,"date":"2016-11-05T10:32:27","date_gmt":"2016-11-05T09:32:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3458"},"modified":"2016-11-05T11:29:44","modified_gmt":"2016-11-05T10:29:44","slug":"you-used-to-ride-on-a-chrome-horse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/3458\/","title":{"rendered":"You used to ride on a chrome horse"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m glad about this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Rolling Stone magazine and a journalist have been found guilty of defamation over a false article about a gang rape at the University of Virginia.<\/p>\n

The $7.5m (\u00a36m) lawsuit was brought by Nicole Eramo, an associate dean from the university, who said the article had cast her as the “chief villain”.<\/p>\n

The 2014 article, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, included the rape claim of an unidentified female student.<\/p>\n

The magazine retracted the article in April 2015, citing inconsistencies.<\/p>\n

The 9,000-word article, entitled A Rape on Campus, centred on the testimony of a student, referred to as “Jackie”, who claimed to have been gang raped at a party held at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity’s house in 2012.<\/p>\n

An investigation by the Charlottesville Police Department had found no evidence that “Jackie” had been gang raped.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As soon as that story was published it got torn apart on the internet. \u00a0Crucially, those tearing it apart were not just the red pill\/manosphere\/PUA sites either. \u00a0Plenty of moderate, mainstream sites cast serious doubts on the story and I read a few of them.<\/p>\n

Common sense would have told you there was something seriously amiss. \u00a0From memory, “Jackie” recounts being thrown onto a glass-topped coffee table so hard that it shattered beneath her and then raped where she lay. \u00a0You don’t need to be a practicing rapist to know that any guy who did that would be risking serious injury to himself: there are arguments over the involuntary circumcision of males, but I don’t think they cover rapists going about their business in lakes of shattered glass. \u00a0She would also have sustained major damage\u00a0had she been subject to those levels of violence: lacerations, fractures, bruising which she could have shown to the police and would have needed hospital treatment.<\/p>\n

It was bullshit, but that wasn’t what made people angry. \u00a0Lots of stories in the media are bullshit and nobody cares. \u00a0So what made this one different? \u00a0It was because those who supposedly supported “Jackie’s” version of events and abused those who questioned it wanted<\/em> it to be true. \u00a0For them,\u00a0it was a better outcome that she had really been raped than for the story to have been fabricated.<\/p>\n

There are feminists and other liberals (in the American political sense) who want to portray American campuses as being hotbeds of rape and sexual assault which gets overlooked by college administrators and law enforcement officers alike because they are in thrall of the Patriarchy. \u00a0Anyone sensible knows this is bullshit: women on American college campuses are not raped and sexual assaulted at a rate only ever seen by women in African war zones, and hundreds of thousands of bright, middle-class women would not borrow so heavily to live in them if this were the case. \u00a0But third-wave feminists and their supporters know this, of course. \u00a0They just hope that by spinning this narrative often enough they can usher in oppressive regulations and laws with which they can control people who harbour thoughts they don’t like.<\/p>\n

The feminists thought they’d gotten their Reichstag Fire with the Duke’s lacrosse<\/a> case, where three white sportsmen allegedly raped a black girl. \u00a0Only the whole case collapsed in a pile\u00a0of lies and corruption, a process which began when people started spotting inconsisitencies in the victim’s story. \u00a0Anyone with any journalistic integrity would have taken note of this case and ensured any similar stories emerging from college campuses would be subject to proper scrutiny, but Rolling Stone, Sabrina Rubin Erdely who wrote the article, and the nutjob feminists were so were so desperate to get this “rape culture” narrative established in American minds that they glossed over obvious inconsistencies and fabrications in “Jackie’s” story.<\/p>\n

So have they learned their lesson? \u00a0It would appear not:<\/p>\n

In a statement, the magazine added: “It is our deep hope that our failings do not deflect from the pervasive issues discussed in the piece<\/strong>, and that reporting on sexual assault cases ultimately results in campus policies that better protect our students.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those “pervasive issues” being complete fabrications which exist only in the minds of a handful of mentally disturbed students who were cynically exploited by some of the worst people ever to infest academia and journalism anywhere.<\/p>\n

I hope the lawsuits keep coming and they are sued out of existence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m glad about this: Rolling Stone magazine and a journalist have been found guilty of defamation over a false article about a gang rape at the University of Virginia. The $7.5m (\u00a36m) lawsuit was brought by Nicole Eramo, an associate … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[79,60,44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3458"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3458"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3467,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3458\/revisions\/3467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}