I pasted an extremely short rebuttal with some generally under utilized facts over at Reharmonize.His reply speaks for itself.Like the original 88ers he never retracts just does another softshoe act and moves by.The fact that this whole thing is a hoax fromthe word go doesn’t bother him at all.

So Sydney, guess what? Before you write a rebuttal, you’re supposed to read and understand the text you’re rebutting. What you wrote is not a rebuttal, it’s a pathetic attempt to explain away the bad behavior of one group of people by dwelling on the bad behavior of another group.

Besides the point I made in the post about the difference between hiring a person and buying a thing, here are a few ways that we seem to disagree: (1) I think Duke students are adults—it seems that you don’t; (2) I think it’s reasonable to expect more self-control and responsibility from Duke students than we’d expect from a substance-abusing stripper/prostitute—apparently you’re happy to square them off in a race for the bottom; (3) Though they’re naive greenhorns to you, I think it’s also reasonable to expect Duke students to know what they’re doing when they call a sleazy service to send a woman they’ve never met over to their house to take off her clothes.

If it makes you feel better and more secure to infantilize the lacrosse team and snort piously about the strippers who victimized them, go right ahead. For that matter, humor yourself into thinking you’re rebutting something, just don’t expect me to go along with the charade.

I suspect you’re going to have to wait a lot longer. For them to admit that they did anything inappropriate by, for example, piling on while the three young men were literally fighting for their lives, is to admit that those unnuanced folks over at D-I-W and Liestoppers actually might have been right about something.

Don’t worry, I’m not holding my breath.

Oh those poor teenagers. First bored, then terrified, then ripped off. Sounds like Duke needs to invest in some nannies.

[A little more followup on this comment is below.]

Yep, the scene that evening seems to have gone back and forth between pathetic and grotesque. The people involved pretty much stumbled into it and then stumbled through it—another way the lynch mob metaphor doesn’t fit.

Several things.

1) The lacrosse team was interested in seeing naked women dance (horrors!) but it’s real clear no one was interested in having sex. So while Crystal Mangum is a prostitute she was not hired in that role. Which fact she misunderstood by continuing to try to get back in the house because she thought “there was more money to be made”. I agree that the lacrosse team were naive about what they were getting into and should have shopped around for actual dancers. But I seriously doubt that had the party gone off without a hitch but later become public it would have made any difference to Tyson’s point of view.

2) The “size of the party” is one of many stories Mangum told. It may or not be true but given her reliability on other matters a little skepticism is in order before it can be repeated as a fact.

3) If we’re going to complain about false representations, those (not you) who want to emphasize the racial angle always seem to forget to mention that the lacrosse players asked for white or Hispanic dancers. When two black women (actually Kim is half Asian and was trying to pass for Hispanic) showed up, the lacrosse team almost called the whole thing off. Aside from a basic disinterest in black women, I think they understood the inherently unstable dynamics that would accompany such a performance. This calls into question much of what has been made of the “race angle”.

4) The team is not “all white” and yes that error by Tyson is important.

In the time this was happening the only sure thing was that it was an ongoing tragedy. If she was telling the truth then Duke had monsters in its midst. But she she was lying, and we got the slightly lesser tragedy we ended up with which could have been put to an end at any time by any number of people in authority behaving in the way they were sworn to do.

What pissed off so many of us was that some of the faculty seized on this tragedy and the lives of the people involved and tried to use it for any purpose what-so-ever. Particularly bad were those who were simply seeking public attention for their work or area of expertise. I put Tyson in this category. To borrow a phrase, it’s “the willingness to treat people as things as the real problem”.

It’s almost as if Virginia Tech faculty had seized on the shootings and said they wanted to start a debate about “America’s gun culture” before the bodies were in the ground. It was not the time and it was not the place and while VT’s faculty were not so clueless about the ramifications of their public behavior, many of Duke’s faculty were completely clueless.

One practical lesson I’d like to learn from the scandal is how to handle myself if sometime in the future offensive student misbehavior brings in law enforcement and the media. Johnson is absolutely right that any public statements should be guided by respect for due process and for my obligations as a member of the faculty. I don’t believe that precludes me from speaking out about what I see as violations of academic and community standards that aren’t in the legal realm.

Good for you. It’s real simple. While three people are on trial for their liberty in the middle of a media feeding frenzy you should refrain from making public statements especially if you have no reason to. Anything you say, one way or the other and no matter how phrased, is guaranteed to be inflammatory. The time to have the academic debate is after it’s over.

1) If I understand Tyson correctly, whether or not the dancers were treated as things doesn’t depend at all on whether the party went without a hitch or not—it depends on the attitudes and assumptions the partyers brought to the transaction, not the outcome. It seems to me that the key question is whether Tyson or I would be as offended if things had gone down just as they did during the party but no rape allegation was made. There’s no way to know for sure, but it seems to me that many people who claimed (and probably believed) that they were judging the party independent of the rape charge weren’t really able to divorce the two. I think Tyson is in that group, and I may be, too.

2) From the Attorney General’s report: “The host did not provide his real name nor did he tell the service that 40 people would be at the party. He asked for two white dancers… to entertain for a small bachelor party….”

3) I like your point about the “inherently unstable dynamics.” Given how they reaction when the dancers showed up, it seems likely that the students had some sense of how charged an encounter it would be to have black women show up and strip.

4) It’s a little game of telephone. Tyson comments about “a room full of drunken Duke students,” Johnson reads that as “all the students at the party”—a small distortion—and you turn it into “the team.” You’re out johnsoning Prof. Johnson in this case, but he does that kind of thing all the time. It’s a way to make Tyson dead wrong—a liar—and not, for instance, simply biased or carried away by his imagination or, as I see it, fudging a detail that doesn’t detract for the point he’s trying to make. This happens so much that I’ve had to conclude that people like you and Johnson feel compelled to turn their opponents into extremists.

Your suggestion that Tyson has hypocritically used the lacrosse players as things to further his agenda is plausible. Certainly that’s a danger—I’ve made a similar criticism of the potbangers. And to the extent that people were raising big, abstract, hot-button issues on the back of the lacrosse incident, your analogy with Va Tech is pretty good. On the other hand, the Duke incident raised pointed questions about the appropriate behavior of students on and around campus, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect all comment and debate about those things to be on hold until there’s a verdict. It’s definitely not realistic to expect that.