HOW IT WORKS

I don’t want to harp on any particular topic within the vast Mania panoply, but this Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) thing and the Christian summer camp suicide on Cape Cod continue to add useful examples of general Mania dynamics as more and more elements and stratagems are called into play. And I think that is worth noting.

Yesterday opinion columnist and member of the ‘Boston Globe’ editorial board Joan Venocchi published a column that demonstrates not only the many knotty and twisty ‘interests’ involved in fueling the Mania and keeping the ball rolling, but also how the Mania can be used for other purposes.

Venocchi is employed by the ‘Globe’, which is very much a ‘liberal’ paper and very much pro-Mania; it has rarely met a Mania initiative or gambit it didn’t like.

Brown is a Republican and the pol who beat the state’s female Democratic Attorney General in a special election for Teddy Kennedy’s seat when that luminary departed this mortal coil to appear before that Judge Who cannot be ‘reached’ or ‘fixed’ – no doubt a novel experience for the gentleman.

Brown has posed the paper a thorny problem: a Republican (and a male) he has made a shrewd tactical move by claiming the mantle of Victimhood with his recent assertion that he was ‘sexually abused’ (apparently groped by a young but still older camp counselor back about 40 years ago). Consequently, he has all of the rights and privileges appertaining thereto: to wit, his claim cannot be questioned, he can reveal as much or as little as he wishes, and he can do so whenever he wants and not before or not at all.

The Democrats, and perhaps the Attorney General herself, would very much like that Senatorial seat back and elections are coming up. How then do you go after Brown the politician without dissing the rights of Brown the alleged abuse-victim? And in the process perhaps exposing a whole bunch of unexamined presumptions about ‘victims’ of ‘sexual abuse’ that none of the major players and interests want to see suddenly pulled into the light of sustained – let alone skeptical – public scrutiny.

The Attorney General herself is keeping out of it, making no public statements of any substance. Her own record of ‘victories’ in Mania cases is apparently not something any of her demographics want to see dragged into the light. She counts among her supporters and colleagues a law professor at a not-first-rate local law school whose most remarkable utterance to date has been that some recent (and dubious) Mania legislation has finally overcome one of the long-standing obstacles to more prosecutions: to wit, that ‘victims’ are not getting ‘justice’ just because there is “no evidence”.

Venocchi is trying to do her bit for the team: she calls upon Brown to reveal the name of his claimed abuser because to keep quiet about it enables the abuser to continue (raising the specter of the alleged abuser carrying on his depredations for the past 40 years and counting).

Brown may well not care to go this deep into the matter since there may come to light a whole bunch of things that he’d rather not see in the public domain – including, perhaps (though it cannot be Correctly suggested in so many words) that the whole story was overblown if not actually fabricated for personal or political gain.

So Venocchi will try to help the election outcome by going after Victim Brown in the name of all other Victims. Brown, ideally, would have to name-names or else admit that he was just trying to surf a useful wave and made the thing up. She scolds him for not fully coming forward. Interestingly, in the case of a female Boston City Councilor (and Democrat) who made an even more recent claim about being a ‘rape’ victim (see my recent Post) and refused to discuss names or dates, Venocchi has nothing to say.

She jazzes things up by referring – although with an uncharacteristically careful “alleged” – to Brown’s groper as a “pedophile” – which clinically is not evident from any information available and may not be accurate at all. (I recall that in the British government’s collaboration with the Bush Administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq the UK equivalent of the US Attorney General referred to Tony Blair’s insistence that the facts by “sexed up” to help move matters along … that sort of thing.)

She also sniffs that Brown’s grossly un-Correct position has not hurt him at all in his standing with Massachusetts voters, though national Democrats and others have tried hard to insert the proverbial broomstick in the rapidly spinning spokes of his bicycle wheel. Which might lead an independently-minded reader to wonder if perhaps the electorate is starting to wise up to the stampede it has been running-in for a couple-three decades now. But this is precisely NOT what Correct dogma and its cadres want to see.

The Comments by readers (which are accessible through the above link) are notable for their refreshing skepticism about Venocchi’s gambit. Which is heartening for members of the SO community who may sometimes be tempted to think that in the matter of public opinion about Things Manic they are mere voices crying in the wilderness.

Today, now, the ‘Globe’ publishes an editorial, ostensibly about Joe Biden’s unveiling last Monday of new Department of Education ‘guidelines’ that essentially seek to apply both the Sex Offense and Domestic Violence Regimes to universities (where liberated females apparently go to lots of parties and drink a great deal with loutish males and then report themselves ‘date raped’, and where sizable numbers of students apparently live together – with or without sex – in some sort of ‘intimate partner’ scenario).

The paper disseminates all the usual ‘Findings’ by government agencies and ‘research’ that justify this ‘emergency’ that somehow is as bad or even worse today than it was 20-plus years ago when major attention was focused on campus sexual behavior.

Thus “one in five” women will be “victims of an attempted or completed sexual assault” during their college years, at least according to “the National Bureau of Justice Statistics” (it’s anybody’s guess whether the capitalization of ‘statistics’ is a typo or an indicator of how very very much such numbers are essential to continuing the career of the Mania). Notice that if “sexual assault” is itself a hugely vague and porous term, the qualifier “attempted” simply intensifies the obfuscation exponentially. And add to that the ‘victim-friendly’ axiom that it is the (self-declared) victim who gets to claim – with some immunity from further investigation – what is ‘sexual’, what is ‘assault’, and what is an ‘attempt’.

We recall that in order to qualify as a ‘statistic’ for the government, it may be necessary simply that a ‘phone survey’ be made, in which the respondent is free to claim whatever she (or he) wishes, secure in the knowledge that the claim will not be ‘studied’ further. After all, to verify is to re-victimize. And quite possibly the government is looking to ‘keep up the numbers’ in the first place.

But just to make sure the herd heads in the right direction the editorial immediately draws the Correct conclusion: the figure is “staggering”. Which, if all the muzzy variables are accurate and forthright, it might very well be. But that’s the problem in so much of these Mania ‘reports’ and ‘studies’, isn’t it?

Attempting to put out a fire that it doesn’t want to admit is burning, the editorial then voluntarily broaches the problem of skepticism about whether “date rape” – apparently also termed “gray rape” by far too many persons – is actually on a victimological par with “stranger rape” (which is what the average citizen would presume rape to be). This un-Correct impression is apparently held by many insensitives who, the paper volunteers, note that in a whopping 90 percent of reported cases the victim and the assailant were somehow “acquainted”.

And worse, the editorial volunteers that this type of insensitive skepticism is shared even by “victims themselves” (and once again, apparently all it takes to qualify as a bonafide ‘victim’ is to claim that you are – which should surely help keep numbers up).

But, the editorial instructs, “that [stranger rape-date rape] distinction doesn’t hold up”.

And as incontrovertible proof that that seemingly common-sensical distinction is actually illusory and inaccurate, the paper quotes a Boston-area university psychology professor who has apparently “studied” the matter of ‘gray rape’ and finds it, he is sure, very black-and-white indeed. Such “undetected rapists” (but surely they were, sooner or later, ‘detected’ by their victims?) ply their intended victims with drugs or alcohol, and otherwise engage in “careful planning and premeditation”. Which sounds very much like what a full-blown rapist might do, except that in this professor’s scenario – or at least the way the paper presents his thoughts – college parties are swarming with highly-focused (yet drunken and loutish) males who are all pursuing, independently, targeting strategies against unsuspecting females (though the standard heterosexual scenario may not be the only one in play and I – for one – would be interested in how many lesbians might be attending the parties with precisely the same tactical plan).

I can’t see how so heavy a concentration of males at a party can simultaneously be drunken frat-boys or jocks partying and yet also felony-level professional criminals capable of devising and executing a comprehensive plan. Even if you factor in, as the prof does, that most of them are “serial offenders” and operate under the cover of “sexually violent subcultures”, among which he singles out “fraternities”. Which makes it all sound like a blend of Fifties-type Communist subversive cells and some frattish-jockish equivalent of The Mob. The solution any parent of the era would have offered was simply to stay away from ‘that type of gathering’ – which, when you think of it, was a hugely efficient and efficacious approach for any particular student: you want to avoid Communists, don’t go to parties at the cell headquarters; you want to avoid The Mob, don’t go to the types of joints the wiseguys usually run.

If nothing else, the prof’s scenario reminds me of something like the royal grand ball in “Start the Revolution Without Me” where half the party-goers are, for their own purposes, trying to assassinate the other half.

But if this is mostly taking place at fraternity parties or jock-parties, then the thing is hardly an uncontrolled epidemic: it is, for one thing, rather substantially localized in certain types of clearly-marked venues where – looking back on my own university days – no students reasonably jealous of time and academic obligations would waste their time. And are there still college-age kids who haven’t seen “Animal House” or any of the zillion knockoff films?

Lest you start drawing your own conclusions or at least wandering off-script (you as a reader are, after all, assigned the cow-in-the-stampede role) the paper instantly funnels you into the Correct chute: “In this light, what some people see as morning-after remorse starts to look suspiciously like a victim coming to grips with a crime”. But this conclusion would only be true of a reader who – in any light – would see the prof’s scenario as both believable and widespread. Trying to hide its own thumb and those of its favored demographics, the paper hides behind the old “some people” dodge. There may indeed be ‘some’; but I wonder if there are ‘many’. And THAT, of course, is a question that none of the Mania-managers want anybody to start wondering about.

“Alas” moans the editorial (yes, that’s an actual quote from the piece), fully 85 percent of “rape victims” do not report “sex assaults” to the authorities. Again you have to ask: are we dealing with ‘rape’ or ‘sex assault’ here? ‘Attempted’ or ‘completed’? And if these episodes are unreported, then how on earth do we know they existed in the first place? Isn’t this the equivalent of the government telling you how many angels (or devils) are dancing on the head of that pin on top of your bureau?

AND if 85 percent of the theoretical victims are not reporting it … what does that say, really, about the way college females consider these things? I can’t accept that a generation that was born and raised completely under the shadow of the Mania is still as reticent about reporting as the college females of the pre-Mania generations.

Is this a case of the ‘advocates’ actually having to tell the alleged victims that they are indeed victims? That seems more than a little odd – although Saul Alinsky, noted ex-Marxist organizer of agitprop and the unapologetically manipulative methods of ‘organizing people’, mentioned often in his text “Rule for Radicals” that sometimes people don’t know what’s good for them and need to be herded along toward the proper conclusions.

You may recall an episode from the old “MASH” TV show where Corporal Klinger, medical orderly who was always trying to find a way off the front-lines, actually rigged up a half-conscious, wounded patient to make it look like he was holding Klinger hostage and the patient wanted them both airlifted to the rear or he would shoot Klinger. The scam fell apart as the patient collapsed unconscious from lack of blood at the door of the tent dropping the gun that Klinger had artfully placed in his limp hand.

The paper – speaking from an Advocacy speaking points sheet, no doubt – wants universities to ‘educate’ “students” against “high-risk behaviors” such as “binge-drinking” (and going to the type of parties where no serious student, male or female, should want to go in the first place). In other words, in the absence of serious parental formation, universities – prodded by the government and its trusty Mania Regime – should try to ‘educate’, although of course without trying to oppress any student’s ‘total autonomy’ by becoming too ‘directive’ or ‘judgmental’. Which, by the by, will require fresh battalions of ancillary employees in the oh-so-mushy ‘consciousness-raising and awareness’ field. Something for everyone.

With predictable but still impressive chutzpah, the paper concludes by sighing that “No one should pretend that sexual assault cases on campus will be easy to prosecute. But district attorneys shouldn’t worry about conviction rates in such areas. And given the serial nature of rapists, any case authorities make is likely to prevent many future assaults”.

What can this possibly mean in actuality? If police and prosecutors are backing away from these ‘gray’ cases because there is no way that even a ‘victim-friendly’ justice system can possibly justify convictions, then are the paper and the advocates for whom it is fronting urging that prosecutors bring charges and cases – with all the costs in time and resources that involves – even though there is no reasonable chance of successful prosecution (and perhaps no reasonable basis for suspecting that the alleged crime was committed in the first place)?

Notice that the paper here is trying to insinuate into the criminal justice system precisely the ‘civil rights’ lowered standard of evidence, whereby the court must presume that the alleged civil-rights violation was probably committed. When this standard and this template is applied to criminal law, in matters where college-age males and females are exercising their ‘total autonomy’ to binge-drink together at parties specifically thrown for that purpose (which, I grant you, is a serious problem all on its own in any case), then the Mania Regime is going to be taking a huge step farther along the dark path down which it has already traveled so great and lethal a distance.

Slyly, the paper thinks to justify this whackulent exhortation by referring to “serial rapists” – which, with the exception of the tenuous assertions of that conveniently Correct psych prof, is a threat that hasn’t been clearly and fully established in the first place.

If a college-age male hoping to ‘get lucky’ at a frat party is already actionably definable as a probable serial-rapist, especially if he is responding to the reality of females (and you can mix and match genders and sexual orientations of both perp and victim however you see fit here) who have come to the party with precisely the purpose of drinking or doing party-drugs until they aren’t sure which is the ceiling and which is the floor (and I am not in favor of such parties in the first place), then universities (and apparently local law enforcement) are going to need to establish Soviet-levels of surveillance, prevention, and prosecution.

But that’s been an operational objective of the Mania from Day One of Year One.

MORE BIDEN

This Post updates the immediately previous Post about the Joe Biden talk up at the University of New Hampshire yesterday.

Biden delivered remarks in support of a “Dear Colleague Letter” (DCL) sent out to administrators of all educational institutions that receive federal funds (which is pretty much all of them) by the Education Department. He chose to make his pitch up at UNH because – it is said – they have such a good campus sexual something reporting and prevention program. (No snark intended: that “something” can mean ‘offense’, ‘harassment’, or a bunch of other possible terms, ‘words’ merely yet in legal reality each one leads down a different wilderness path – but Joe was always “bored” in law school with “technicalities” and, come to think of it, that must be said, in a general legal sort of way, about the entire government nowadays).

The ‘Los Angeles Times’ article notes that students “deserve the safest possible environment” in which to learn, and who can deny it? But that “safest” is a tricky word: the “safest” thing would be to either have gender-separate facilities or flood the institution with Preventive Police (sort of a third category of police, along with what the Germans used to categorize as the Order Police and the Criminal Police – well, and perhaps the Secret State Police, but ‘Gestapo’ might be a bit inflammatory in this context). You can go as far as you like along the “safest” road, but then you might find yourself in a very dark territory indeed, at least in terms of a constitutionally-limited sovereign police power.

The DCL requires “immediate action” but due-process takes a little time if you’re going to do it right; but then, in all this Mania thing, the shrill bray of ‘emergency’ is precisely designed to override all that.

The institution is required to initiate its own investigation even if a formal police investigation is still being conducted – which cannot but muddy the waters. But I’m going to imagine that the police haven’t been Correct enough in deciding to open cases, and thus are not as ‘reliable’ as perhaps they once were.

The trick here is to declare sexual violence (however defined) as a form of discrimination and harassment as defined under Title IX, that federal regulation that was originally designed to ensure that females would get equal chance to have athletic programs.

Another article mentions an issue currently being pursued against Yale where the claim is made that even a single instance of any form of rape or sexual violence (however defined) is sufficient to “create a hostile environment”, and anybody familiar with employment law and policy knows where that type of thing very quickly goes.

The ‘Christian Science Monitor’ notes acutely that this entire gambit is based on Title IX, originally associated, as aforenoted, with “gender equity in sports”. The article provides a concise set of bullet-points summarizing the gambit: Title IX is to be considered as protecting all students from sexual harassment (however defined); institutions must have in place a clear system for grievances and also make sure that all students are aware of the system; the institution is not relieved of the responsibility to conduct its own Title IX investigation even if a criminal investigation of the same complaint is still being conducted; AND – most slyly – the Title IX investigation must not use the standard of proof (clear and convincing) required in criminal cases but instead must use the “more likely than not” standard used in racial discrimination cases (meaning that the judging authority must go into the hearing already convinced that the offending action probably did happen).

You can see where this sort of thing can go. Sexual ‘whatever’ charges are now to get the same presumptively-credible treatment as charges related to racism did back in the days of Jim Crow. This is a clear hark-back to the follow-on feminist ‘revolution’in the 1970s trying quickly to piggy-back itself on the Civil Rights movement and its strategies and on the federal legislation that continued to flow from the Beltway as the government found itself being drawn deeper into deeper into social terraforming (in an eerie simulacrum of the dynamics active in Vietnam at precisely the same time).

All of this is necessary to help students “feel safe”, although if after decades of the Mania Regime(s) that objective has not yet been achieved then (as should have happened in Vietnam) serious questions should be asked as to whether the government’s efforts are somehow ill-conceived.

And as well, the institution is also responsible for off-campus incidents involving allegations raised by and against its students, and must also carry out these ‘victim-friendly’ Title IX hearings and investigations.

Another site notes that “Mr. Biden’s New Hampshire visit is part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to draw attention to sexual violence and ways to prevent it”. Which leads me to wonder if this sort of thing doesn’t represent more of a political and electioneering gambit, an effort to whomp up support among a ‘base’ (especially in a State that has one of the earliest primaries, if memory serves).

The site notes that the government quotes from what it considers to be a vitally relevant DOJ-funded 2007 “study” that turns out to have been “a private, Internet-based survey of undergraduate women in 2007 at two public universities in which 19 percent of respondents reported that they had been victims of attempted or actual sexual assault while at college”. I point out again that this is more of a ‘survey’ than a formal ‘study’, meaning that anybody contacted (or perhaps volunteers to say their say) can say whatever they want in the sure and certain knowledge that the ‘researchers’ are not going to be fact-checking or Kicking Tire. The SO community will not be unfamiliar with this type of ‘study’ and the Findings that flow from it.

If you look at this site’s piece, I strongly advise looking at the Comments as well, since they give many heartening examples that there are still Tire-Kickers alive and well in the land.

And even the venerable ‘Chronicle of Higher Education’ site discusses the matter (and again, look at the Comments). And it is in this site’s piece that you will find a link to the DCL itself.

The Chronicle piece notes that somehow sexual harassment or violence (however defined) has morphed into that ‘discrimination’ which the Title, along with all the other anti-discrimination legislation and regulations of the era, was designed to prevent.

This suggests two thoughts to me.

First, they must be getting pretty pressed for ‘issues’ in the Beltway if they have to start playing around like this. And it’s been decades (Antioch College’s sex code was 20 years ago) since all this agitation began, so it’s hard to believe that college students today remain as unenlightened as they were in the ‘90s or the ‘80s.

Second, there is the rotting whiff of the radical feminist assertion that all sex is simultaneously both a male-perpetrated crime and a political act of oppression. The antidiscrimination legislation was passed to prevent acts and ‘environments’ hostile to blacks simply because of their race. If as a non-black you choose to postpone other activities in order to single out blacks and somehow harm or make them feel denigrated merely because of their race, then you are discriminating.

But here there is simply the menu of sexual relationships and interactions; males do not seek out relationships with females (nor females with males) in order to discriminate against them but simply because it is by and large the evolutionary nature of this gendered species we belong to. And if a heterosexual male does actually and provably commit an actionable assault or crime against a female, it is not because he has chosen to discriminate against her when he might have simply gone off and have himself an encounter with another sex – the ‘civil rights-racism’ template doesn’t work in this scenario at all.

I can’t get out of my head some variant of Christina Hoff Sommers’s 1994 insight: there is something queasily ‘queer’ about all this: it’s almost as if the ‘advocates of the base’ in this thing would prefer that males have sex with males and females with females … I don’t see that this thing bodes well for heterosexuals of either sex.

The ‘Chronicle’ piece also notes that the institution should feel free to deploy such sanctions – even during the investigation period – as requiring a change in dorm housing or prohibiting an accused student from attending classes. This strikes me as very much in the style of the Domestic Violence Regime: whoever steals a march on the other partner and ex parte gets the coveted ‘victim’ part quickly winds up with an Order that can deprive the other partner (cast by default as the ‘perp’) of access to home, funds, children. The excuse given is that this is an ‘emergency’ and it isn’t ‘criminal’ (although if you violate the Order, then THAT is criminal) and it’s all about ‘safety’ and it’s only for 10 days or so anyway (try keeping a job and a life together for 10 days with no access to house, funds, possibly auto, and so forth).

The piece is not fooled, although it displays an admirable restraint: “Some legal experts, however, worry that colleges' investigations and hearings of sexual-assault allegations are inevitably fraught. Criminal prosecutors, for lack of evidence, decline to pursue many cases; under Title IX, colleges must … We've been lured into doing something in a criminal-justice model that the criminal-justice system itself hasn't been able to deal with", one university legal expert is quoted as saying.

And this takes things back to something that I think has been developing for a while: police agencies and/or prosecutors are starting to back away from the tripwire prosecutions of the ‘classical’ age of the Mania , either because they don’t have the money any longer, or juries and citizens are no longer stampeding reliably, or courts are beginning to get worried about how far things have gone, or perhaps even that a point in this sort of cycle has inevitably been reached where its agents are starting to think about how they’re going to look if the scales fall from the public eye … for whatever reason the heyday of gaudy and guaranteed prosecutions and convictions has passed. And yet the government has to keep up the groundswell to please an advocacy ‘base’ and all the cottage-industries that have now accreted parasitically around the initiative.

And so the government must cast about for other ways to keep the ball rolling: thus the ‘commerce clause’ justification for the AWA, the sly efforts to give ‘advocacy groups’ funding and even quasi-police authority, and now this Title IX gambit. But I think that the more tenuous and tendentious the gambits to sew together ‘new’ initiatives to meet fresh discoveries of ‘emergencies’ is going to make police and prosecutors even more uneasy – it is their violation of their sworn responsibilities, after all, that might wind up being used as evidence against them if public opinion recovers a sufficient sense of balance.

And as I have said in previous Posts, certain other government initiatives pretty much guarantee that young males and females are coming to schools less capable of mastering their sexual powers.

The piece even notes that one suggestion is for professors to “spend more time with” students; the article quickly observes that university tasks are structured in such a way that ranking professors are busy with a whole lot of other things besides ‘spending time with’ freshmen.

I would add that given the entire thrust of ‘professional sex offenses’ a professor would have to be several sandwiches short of a picnic to want to expose himself (or herself, perhaps) to the ominous dangers of spending out-of-class time with students.

And precisely what would be the purpose of such an initiative? To provide ‘adult’ companionship that many of the students precisely did not get in whatever passed for ‘family’ in the vital developmental years of their childhood? Are professors to be hastily stuffed like wadded-up bedsheets into the gaping and jagged holes in their students’ lives that were created in the first place by the torpedo-blasts of other government programs and philosophies?

Lastly, one advocate burbles that she hopes that a Bill currently making its way around Capitol Hill (H.R. 6461, see its text here , will be speeded-up by Biden’s speech and the DCL. I am not going to go into the Bill’s text itself (it’s not more than 10pages long if you want to look at it) but I do note that it is designed to prevent in universities not only ‘rape’ (however defined) and sexual violence (ditto) but also sexual harassment (ditto) and stalking (ditto) and even intimate-partner violence (for which, marvelously, no actual sex need have ever occurred to justify the categorization of ‘intimate’).

Well, the Mania Regime is now reaching a point where the hasty, Frankenstein sutures are beginning to show. But that is not good news: lives are being wrecked, vital institutions are being increasingly deranged, and the sovereign authority of the government – already bethumped by an increasingly broad burden of dubious achievements and queasy failures – is being further weakened at a time in the nation’s history when the country needs more coherent intelligence in public policy than it ever has before.

So much needs to be done.