I wrote the other day that the Rolling Stone tale about a rape victim at the University of Virginia sounded fake. In order for it to be true requires a whole lot of other things to be true that are implausible. The most obvious being that a university where victimology is a mandatory religion would callously suppress stories about their secret rape culture. It also requires me to believe that upper-middle class Eloi, who spend their days playing Quidditch, are barbaric rapist at night. That and the story sounds like a passage from Lena Dunham psuedo-biography.
It looks like Steve Sailer is on the story now. And some guy I never heard of is on the trail too.
The latter blogger makes some good factual points. He also touches on what I wrote and that is the Rolling Stone story reads like a bad after school special. It is what people imagine goes one with their worst enemies when no one is around to record it. In this case, the rape culture fanatics in the womyn’s studies program who never get invited to frat parties. They think all men are rapists, particularly the ones who never look their way.
I have some familiarity with the University of Virginia. It is one of the “New Ivies” and that means it is drawing from the upper-middle classes. The members of the plutocracy that live in Northern Virginia send their kids there. This is the most fragile of the fragile males for the most part. I’m talking about the kid of boys that write things like this. If anyone is getting raped in these fraternities, it is the frat brothers.
I’m reminded of the Isaac Asimov novel Foundation. The people in charge figured out how to use religion to control their more powerful enemies. They turned science into a religion and supplied the “priests” to administer the “religion” for their neighbors. The point being is that if you control the magical thoughts all people have in their heads, you effectively control the people. Today, the magical thinking in most people’s heads has to do with keeping the pale penis people from rampaging through the vulnerable. The Cult through its cadre of priests is there to protect blacks, young women, foreigners, etc.
I cannot comment on what happens on the campus of any one US University, let alone on a specific place like University of Virginia. But I am qualified to speak about the news gathering and processing of information as I worked in the media for many years.
The whole point of the media is to tell a story. It may or may not be entirely accurate, but the telling is the important aspect. As such, news comes in to the media office and has to be analysed (we called it being ‘tasted’ to see if if, I suppose, it was palatable for our readers) but we also knew that there had to be a number of background checks made on a news story.
In many cases you couldn’t get the story exactly right (An aside: I was once berated at length by a couple who lived on the same street as a man who committed suicide and the newspaper had published in its report he was 63. This couple told me my paper was useless because they knew this unfortunate man was in fact 64 when he died) but there were some approaches you could take to determining if the story was reasonably correct at the time of going to press.
There’s the kicker: at some point you have to publish and as such the news gatherers are pinned to print and/or distribution times.
Sometimes the desire to examine a source might head in the wrong direction for too long. An example of this was when an editorial office I worked with had heard that a teenage schoolboy, on a visit to a zoo, had stuffed a baby penguin into his bag and smuggled it on to the school bus. Now this is one of those ‘urban myths’ that bounce around but in their eagerness for such a good story the editorial people got on it at once. They sat down and began phoning the city’s schools to check if there had been any party of school kids going to this particular zoo that day, and if so had any bulging, struggling bags been seen on buses.
They spent a couple of hours drawing blanks on that, and abandoned the story as unlikely. It was only later that the editor wanted to know why his team hadn’t done the obvious thing and asked the zoo if one of their penguins was missing. The oh-so-eager journos could only hide their embarrassment by saying they thought ringing dozens of schools was the right way to verify the story.
So, the point of this is that sometimes even experienced journalists don’t ask the obvious questions in the right way. The same may go for their editors, too.
This doesn’t mean the UVA story is true (FWIW I think it is doubtful for a number of reasons) but journalists can sometimes chase the wrong cat up a distant tree.
What a delicious rape fantasy. What a colossal example of penis envy, or should I say penis desire.
The tip-off here is the shards of glass tale. A tasty tidbit indeed, but completely false. Such a situation would cause profuse bleeding and require immediate emergency care.
Not sure why you deny the UVA rapes. Frat boys are degenerates and peer pressure plus alcohol makes them worse. I don’t doubt the girl’s story is true and the journalist is said to have conducted significant background research.