I wonder how many people at Duke read KC Johnson’s editorial about campus reactions to the allegations against the lacrosse team, posted on Inside Higher Ed on May 1, 2006 (probably at least one—in the comments there’s a brief clarification signed “Mark Anthony Neal”). It’s an editorial that deserved more attention than I suspect it got. It voiced concerns that needed to be heard and held an unflattering mirror up to the contingent of Duke faculty who approached the lacrosse case as a platform for big institutional and ideological issues, ignoring or perhaps even supporting the shoddy investigation and the thoughtless, shrill protests. The editorial is clear and to the point, and it’s relatively free of the tiresome, judgmental rhetoric that clutters Johnson’s blog, Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW). The sympathetic observations about athletics and athletes are especially good. All in all it does exactly what an editorial should do—it articulates a point of view in a way that encourages reconsideration and debate. This one, it seems to me, presented an opportunity for the people targeted by Johnson to think about what they really wanted to stand for.
Focussing on that editorial makes a great deal of Johnson’s subsequent blogging seem redundant. Probably that has more to do with 20-20 hindsight and my poor opinion of DIW than anything else. The blog went on and on, though, accumulating a lot of detail but very little depth. I might feel differently if the editorial had been about the criminal investigation. In the three posts Johnson wrote for Cliopatria in April 2006—the start of what would become Durham-in-Wonderland—he touched on Reade Seligmann’s convincing alibi, the flawed line-ups, and Nifong’s political opportunism and the pandering that went with it. Those turned out to be good indicators of how the prosecution would go (how it would crash and burn, that is), and Johnson read the signs more accurately than many of the rest of us. The stakes were high, and there was every reason to keep a close eye on what Nifong was doing. But as the title says, the editorial is about “Duke’s Poisoned Campus Culture,” and the problems with the investigation are only mentioned to show how clouded and agenda-driven the judgment of many professors at Duke had been. Based on DIW, Johnson seems to have been as prescient about those professors as he was about Nifong. But within the frame of such a sprawling narrative, prescience and tunnel vision can be hard to tell apart, and when it comes to Duke’s campus culture, it’s tunnel vision that dominates in DIW.
Johnson was already blogging and editorializing about academic culture issues when the charges against the lacrosse team hit the news. The ideological skew of Duke’s faculty figured in a piece he wrote for Inside Higher Ed the previous summer. From it he recycles a bad joke about stupid conservatives told by the chairman of Duke’s philosophy department, giving it vastly overblown significance as stage-setting for the lacrosse case. His glaring evidence of poison, though—the foundation of his ongoing critique of Duke faculty—is the “listening” statement, which he’d written about for the first time about a week before “Duke’s Poisoned Campus Culture.” Along with the statement came the so-called “Group of 88” (his term, I believe) who endorsed it, professors he found so transparent that he casually extrapolates their collective thinking to its “logical, if absurd, extreme”—some lacrosse players should be convicted for rape just because of who they are, no matter what they did or didn’t do.
After the editorial, the only significant change I see in Johnson’s picture of Duke’s campus culture is his assessment of Brodhead and of the lacrosse players, which quickly becomes morally simplistic. In fact a key passage is different in the version of the editorial posted on DIW (overstruck words are on Inside Higher Ed and the italicized word is in the blog):
Few would deny that several players on Duke’s lacrosse team have behaved
repulsivelybadlly [sic]. Two team captains hired exotic dancers, supplied alcohol to underage team members, and concluded a public argument with one of the dancers with racial epithets. Brodheadappropriatelycancelled the team’s season and demanded the coach’s resignation.
As far as his trumped-up “Group” goes, things remain the same without even changing much. In the editorial, Johnson writes, “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, for [Houston] Baker and many others who signed the faculty statement, the race, class, and gender of the men’s lacrosse team produced a guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality.” It was hard for him to escape the conclusion, that’s for sure. Fast-forward to “Legacies,” his final post before putting DIW on hiatus in December 2007, and he highlights the “race/class/gender extremists” who jerked the administration’s chain and were “only too willing to advance their personal, pedagogical, or ideological agendas on the backs of their own students.” Another major legacy he chooses to reinforce is “the pernicious effects of academic groupthink,” a theme that he first brought up in DIW in late May 2006 (the legacy he doesn’t mention is DIW’s remarkable success at fostering its own little groupthink community, part of a gossiping network of like-minded sites).
On the face of it, it’s hard for me to see how a historian could spend a year and a half analyzing an ongoing controversy and find nothing that poses a significant challenge to his earliest firm impressions of it. It’s a record that suggests that the project isn’t really analysis, and in fact it turns out to be more like prosecution. There’s no denying that the most prominent and vocal of the faculty he criticizes did nothing overt to break the mold—they stuck close to their issues or were silent, so Johnson is fully justified in sticking to his guns as well. Still, there’s a lot of filtering out of things he apparently doesn’t want the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to be thinking about. And filtering alone isn’t enough to support the one-sided case he seems determined to make. It also requires quite a bit of what I’ve described as misrepresentation, manipulation, distortion, etc. Now I realize there’s a better word for all that, one that really captures the spirit of Johnson’s anti-academic crusade—bullshit.
It was a reader’s comment that got me thinking about how useful the word is (I’ll get back to the comment later), and then I remembered a little book I bought a few years ago called On Bullshit, written by Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. One of my favorite lines from it—part of a discussion of whether bullshit is analogous to “carelessly made, shoddy goods”—brings out the book’s quietly surreal juxtaposition of subject and style.
Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought.
The “essence of bullshit,” according to Frankfurt, is a “lack of connection to a concern with truth—[an] indifference to how things really are.” That sets it apart not only from truth-telling but also from lying, because you have to consider the truth before you can tell a lie. In a helpful review of the book in Slate, Timothy Noah gives as an example the claim the famously surfaced in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, about Saddam Hussein’s efforts to buy nuclear material from Niger. The possible basis for that claim is murky enough that it might not be the best example, but assuming for the sake of argument that it was as bogus as Bush’s critics believe, it does seem more like indifference to the truth than like a conscious decision to peddle outright falsehood.
Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost.
Noah’s example brings out a limitation of Frankfurt’s schematic analysis, though. In many real-world situations even the most honest person can’t be sure about “the way things are.” What I think stands for “the truth” in those situations is honest, dispassionate analysis, even though it might lead different people to different truths. With respect to national security matters like the yellowcake from Niger, the uncertainty and inaccessibility of the evidence seems to be a standing invitation to bullshit—one that’s frequently accepted by politicians of all stripes. The Bush administration seems to find it especially irresistible, and even compared to other political machines they’re way out of the “normal habit of attending to the way things are.”
It isn’t just a matter of “what it suits one to say,” though. First of all, bullshit isn’t likely to work if it isn’t plausible and/or appealing to the intended audience. And it usually serves some purpose or furthers some agenda—justifying a war, for instance. Johnson treats the lacrosse case as a battlefront in the culture war, so even though he approaches the fight more like a prosecutor than a general his purpose isn’t so different from Bush’s. His analysis is thoroughly agenda-driven—scratch the surface, and you’re likely to find some bullshit. And it can be pretty easy to identify. He’s covered the scandal from a distance, drawing on essays, interviews, news reports, and the like. Often in DIW all you have to do is follow the helpful link to the original text. There’s a fair chance that it’s been manipulated to show that the person who said or wrote it has exactly the values and beliefs that you’d expect from a race/class/gender extremist, or else fudged to bring out the topsy-turvy irrationality of Wonderland, where the crazies and cowards are running the show. Some of Johnson’s bullshit is generated in other ways, but the end it serves is pretty consistent.
I made a list of some of the more obvious bullshit I’ve come across in DIW, but it’s gotten so long enough that I’ll post it separately, within a day or two. [Here it is.] Much of it comes from earlier entries, though: What Mark Anthony Neal supposedly hears students mutter at the beginning of the new semester, the persecution of Steven Baldwin, and just about everything Johnson wrote about Karla Holloway’s article “Coda: Body of Evidence.”
It’s one thing for a self-appointed pundit to churn out bullshit—it’s practically the job description. Even a moderate amount of bullshit from someone backed by the power of law enforcement is a much more serious thing. Nifong seems to have been a copious, shameless bullshitter, and the consequences were disastrous for the people who ended up under his thumb. The silver lining is that in the end it all came back to haunt him. In the first flush of news coverage he spent hours and hours feeding the beast what it wanted to hear. Speaking to N&O reporter Joe Neff, James Coleman starts off sounding a bit like Frankfurt:
“Either he knew what the facts were and misstated them, or he was making them up,” said James Coleman, a Duke law professor who has publicly requested that Nifong remove himself from the case. “Whether he acted knowing they were false, or if he was reckless, it doesn’t matter in the long run. This is the kind of stuff that causes the public to lose confidence in the justice system.”
A line of bullshit that was all too effective in rallying the Duke community and neighbors against the lacrosse team was the bit about how they were stonewalling. It seems to have been largely the work of Durham Police Cpl. David Addison. Among his deceptive statements was this one, to the Durham Herald-Sun: “Addison said police approached the lacrosse team with the five-page search warrant on March 16, but that all of the members refused to cooperate with the investigation.” In fact after the search warrant was executed co-captains David Evans, Dan Flannery and Matt Zash volunteered to be interviewed by the police at length and without counsel present.
In late April 2006, a headline in USA Today announced “A perfect storm: Explosive convergence helps lacrosse scandal resonate.” Behind the storm, according to the article, was the “national flash points of race, class, gender, violence, money and privilege.” (James Coleman’s pithy reply a year later: sure it was a perfect storm, “but we know now it was based on this false notion a crime had been committed…. That generated everything.”). Duke is a sprawling institution that tries to be a great many things to a great many people, and it’s my sense that the lacrosse team became a vessel not only for the reflexive shock and disgust tied to those “national flash points” but also for various smoldering frustrations with the university. From where I sit now the collective reaction of much of the community looks like a body ejecting diseased cells that had been circulating undetected. Whatever the factors were behind it, it wasn’t pretty, and it seems to have made it hard to think clearly. It was not only irresponsible but a remarkable lapse of common sense if, as alleged in one of the ongoing civil suits, the message from the Duke administration to the players was “you don’t need a lawyer,” and “don’t tell anyone this is happening, not even your parents” (McFayden et al v. Duke University et al, p. 129). And it’s true, as Tim Tyson recently noted, that folks around campus were reacting to information that came from people who were in a unique position to know—the police and the prosecutor. In different circumstances, though, if the accused had looked more like the people who are typical charged with violent crimes, the word of the authorities would likely have been taken with healthy skepticism if not disdain. It seems like that skepticism should cut both ways. All in all it was fertile ground for Addison’s misinformation. Some people, including a number of professors who really should have known better, took it as an excuse to indulge in a little high-handed vigilantism, for example by singling the players out in class or in private communications and exhorting them to fess up.
No one took up the invitation to vigilantism and ran further with it than the potbangers. It took some bullshitting to fit real-life events and people to their metanarrative—another dimension to the mirror-image parallelism between the potbangers and KC Johnson that I pointed out in my first post about the case. For both, “perfecting” and bullshitting seem to go hand in hand (that’s using—maybe abusing—a term that I continue to find very apt, introduced into the debate by Wahneema Lubiano). For the potbangers, the need to embroider went beyond just “perfecting” the offenders and the “survivor.” What stands out to me is the bizarre reasoning that took a form of protest from tight-knit but underpoliced third-world communities and dropped it into the middle of a first-world media feeding frenzy.
This is a good place to bring up the comment that got me thinking about bullshit in the first place, since it puts the potbangers into sharp relief. It’s from RRH, an attorney and also a mainstay of the DIW commentariat, part of an interesting exchange we had about how and why our perspectives on the case are so profoundly different.
Attorneys have heard—or heard from other attorneys—nearly every cockamamie story there is. Thus, we have developed internal “bullshit-detectors” that are so finely tuned that they are probably exceeded by only those of cops. Thus, when I heard the first reports about lacrosse case in 2006 (on ESPN), I was skeptical to the point just short of disbelief. The story is that several Alpha-male college students were going to risk reputations, diseases, paternity lawsuits, future careers, and family shame to put their most precious body parts into a party stripper? As we say in the legal business, that story already “strained credulity”.
And that’s even without the added allegation that the sex was involuntary. A party stripper with such fastidious morals and high standards of sex partners that she was going to turn down a chance for mating with such Alpha-males? Again, the bullshit-detector is sounding like an air raid siren.
I don’t understand how the “allegation that the sex was involuntary” could be in addition to the first reports, and the pop sociobiology doesn’t do much for me. But I don’t at all dismiss the bullshit detector he’s talking about, and it seems to me that there’s more behind it than just stories. “Perfecting” clients would surely be a great way to be a lousy lawyer. To be effective in the nitty-gritty of a criminal proceeding, it seems to me you’d have to be firmly in touch with the unvarnished and sometimes unpalatable humanity of everyone involved. That realization has helped me to clarify the nature and ethics of the choice that was made by protesters who felt they needed to shout slogans as if there was no question a rape occurred. Their perspective on the accuser—at the time not really “Crystal Mangum” but the heavily filtered impressions of her from the media and police—may be more palatable than RRH’s, but those protesters could and in my opinion did get things wildly wrong without experiencing any significant consequences.
It doesn’t take RRH’s crude realism to rein in the bullshit. It seems to me, anyway, that enough mental discipline to keep the accuser in the realm of everyday, imperfect human beings should be sufficient. There is a big temptation to put a positive spin on the accuser in high-profile rape cases, or at least on this particular one. I understand and respect the desire to resist dismissive and demeaning efforts to put these women on trial in the court of public opinion and undercut them in the court of law. But it seems to be a hard thing to do without getting into some euphemistic bullshit, even when it’s not nearly as idealizing as the potbanger’s rhetoric. For instance, Cathy Davidson, a professor of English at Duke, asks, “Who is that exotic dancer? A single mother who takes off her clothes for hire partly to pay for tuition at a distinguished historically black college.” I’m quoting Davidson because her op-ed is handy at the moment. It’s not really fair to pick on her, though, since her main point is socioeconomic—in different circumstances she could have replaced “takes off her clothes” with “cleans toilets seven nights a week” or “serves as a guinea pig for grueling pharmaceutical trials.” But I feel like I’ve seen a number of variations on the theme of the student mom reduced to stripping to get an education, and for me they have a sanitized feel that calls to mind noxious Hollywood fairy tales like “Pretty Woman.” The rhetoric kicked up by recent news that Mangum graduated from North Carolina Central showed that she’s still little more than a rhetorical football for both sides. It seemed like an event with enough significance and irony to provoke some clear-headed analysis, but I didn’t find any.
My feeling is that one purpose of the critical analysis and writing we assign to our undergraduates is building up their resistance to bullshit. Whether or not that’s a common opinion, it seems like professors, of all people, should be bullshit detectors and not bullshit producers. And not just detectors pointed at the other side—as I’ve shown by example many times, that’s the easy part. I can think of only two at Duke who’ve stood out for their non-partisan bullshit detecting—James Coleman and Michael Gustafson. It’s a discredit to the professors on the Left—especially but not only at Duke—that they had nothing to say about the poor judgment and poor reasoning of the potbangers and like-minded protesters. (The one exception I’m aware of is Wahneema Lubiano, of all people. I wish her reservations about “perfecting” had been less equivocal and more forthright, but those aren’t the main reasons her critics were so insistent about misconstruing her.)
I don’t see bullshit as such a consistent problem coming from the Duke side, which isn’t to say that they did a lot better than Johnson, just that they erred in different ways—most obviously with their callous attitude towards the students who were facing drastic legal consequences. There was definitely some bullshitting, though. Houston Baker’s histrionic letter is probably the standout. Parts of it—“And when will the others assaulted by racist epithets while passing 610 Buchanan ever forget that dark moment brought on them by a group of drunken Duke boys?,” etc.—are not only bullshit, they’re pretentious bullshit. It’s my impression that many liestoppers would put Cathy Davidson’s January 2007 editorial high on the bullshit scale. Taken as a whole I don’t see why it’s so offensive—a lot of it strikes me as honest and conciliatory—but she does start out with a whopper, claiming that in the rhetorical climate that motivated the “listening” statement, “defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women.” Not only had those three not been indicted when the “listening” statement was published, they hadn’t even been singled out from the rest of the team as likely suspects. It’s a straightforward mistake, but for someone writing an editorial that purports to explain key events of the first few intense weeks of the scandal, it does suggest indifference to reality. I imagine that the line that serves as Karla Holloway’s motto in DIW—“White innocence means black guilt. Men’s innocence means women’s guilt”—would also be ranked as prime bullshit by her critics. Understood in context, I think that’s debatable. It seems to me that it’s not with any particular statement that she most clearly lapses into bullshit, it’s her general failure to own up to her role in stirring up the bitter discourse that she found so onerous, and her tendency to place herself outside and on the receiving end of the university’s power structure. And then there’s the “listening” statement. For me it’s the first line—“We are listening to our students”—that stands out as obvious bullshit. They were listening to some of their students. It’s too much like the vacuous cliché about listening to the “will of the American people” that’s endlessly falling out of the mouths of politicians.
It’s a pretty good measure of the real purpose and integrity of DIW that, leaving aside Baker’s letter, which is pretty much a sitting duck, Johnson responds to most of this stuff from the Duke side with bullshit of his own. The DIW impression of Holloway’s infamous line is largely an artifact of Johnson’s bullshit. And after pointing out the factual silliness of Davidson’s mention of the three indicted players, he turns to the statement she surely meant to make, about rhetoric in defense of the lacrosse players generally.
In late March, when the idea for the Group of 88’s statement originated, who—either on Duke’s campus or in the media—was elevating the lacrosse players “to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism”? Certainly not the protesters to whom Davidson and the other Group members said “thank you”…. Between March 29 and the issuance of the Group’s statement on April 6, were members of the media or cable news network talking heads elevating the lacrosse players “to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism”?
He starts by asking exactly the right question, then gives a non-answer that’s really just an excuse to slip in one of his boilerplate formulas for denouncing the “Group,” and finally comes to rest on “media or cable news network talking heads.” It may be bullshit to claim that there was backlash against black students, and “[t]he insults, at that time, were rampant.” I can’t say for sure either way. But I’m confident that a great deal was said and felt by students walking across campus at night, say, or down a dorm hallway, that wasn’t picked up by any “talking heads” or even in the campus paper. No doubt it suits Johnson to believe that he was getting a complete and accurate impression of events at Duke as he was following the news from several states away. It’s self-serving bullshit, though, especially coming from a historian dabbling in journalism—people in both fields are supposed to have some sophistication about the way their evidence is mediated. He could have gleaned at least a hint of what black students experienced at the time from the comments quoted in the “listening” statement. But he never treats those students as if they’re worth listening to (he does suggest in an obnoxious reference to them as “alleged students [who] can testify as to what they said” that they’d be good subjects for an inquisition).
At least two Duke professors picked up echos in the lacrosse incident of institutionalized, open, and often violent racism of the old South. For both there’s a close connection to their scholarly work. Both allude to the unproven nature of the rape allegations and claim to be setting them aside while they consider other aspects of the students’ behavior that evening, but it seems to me that the impression of the brutality of the alleged crime still filters into their judgment (see James Coleman’s comment above about the perfect storm). Tim Tyson saw the “spirit of the lynch mob” in the crowd of young men at the party. William Chafe saw a continuation of the “poisonous linkage of race and sex as instruments of power and control” that’s integral to southern history. I know that for me and many others, the impression of a gang of young white men clustered drunkenly around a couple of half-naked black women had some very ugly resonances. But that’s a gut response, and it seems like neither Chase or Tyson gave it the critical consideration they should have before they said their piece. I’ve already described my reservations with Tyson’s lynch mob analogy. Turning to Chafe, how much context, really, does Emmett Till—brutally beaten and then shot, eye gouged out, barbed wire strung around his neck—provide for that party? In both cases, there is a bullshit gap, I guess you could call it. In fact the gap seems so obvious, especially in Chafe’s case, that I don’t really feel like they’re trying to bullshit me.
Mark Anthony Neal’s comments about “racialized sexual violence” pull the same general issues into a more contemporary context—relating the lacrosse incident not to old-fashioned lynching and brutality but to the present-day media-driven discourse that holds that “black women and their bodies have little value, little protection and are accessible to anyone who feels entitled to them.” It seems to me that this makes some contact with the spirit of the party. There was, for instance, the infamous parting shot: “Hey bitch, thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt.” (According to KC Johnson it’s “a tasteless rip-off of a Chris Rock joke”—a widely held opinion that I find entirely plausible, but it’s typical of the mountain of self-perpetuating verbiage that’s been left by this scandal that I can’t find a source pinning the joke to any particular Chris Rock show. I did find a thread on the TalkLeft forums initiated by someone wanting to know the same thing—after 200+ comments there’s no definitive conclusion.) Being more plugged into the here and now turns out to have its dangers—it leads Neal into some speculation about how the lacrosse team may have been “hoping to consume something that they felt that a black woman uniquely possessed.” That would be blatant bullshit if it wasn’t framed as speculation—perhaps it still counts, but it’s most problematic for other reasons.
Neal is capable of writing with style and insight about the “fo’ real,” as he calls it, but in this case the elision he makes between rhetorical violence and brutal physical assault lands him in bullshit territory. RRH’s caustic perspective is again an antidote, a reminder of how animalistic the alleged acts would have been, and the deeply ingrained barriers that would have had to be overcome. It seems to me that a more incisive point of reference is the typical scenarios for alcohol- and entitlement-fueled assaults involving college students, which usually involve some mutual socializing and perhaps mixed signals as well. It’s not hard to see how the inhibition is overcome in those circumstances, and it’s not far-fetched that there could be some acting out of the kind of rhetoric Neal highlighted. The final step in RRH’s bullshit detecting is statistical—“Single-offender white on black rapes are so infrequent that they show up usually as asterisks in crime statistics, and white multiple offender rapes of black women are barely more frequent than carjackings by Amish farmers.” It’s grounds for skepticism, for sure, but it’s just a mindless number that could be hiding who knows what biases or artifacts. There’s little if any insight in it.
{ 59 } Comments
Let me get this straight. K.C. Johnson is at fault (and the moral equivalent of the disbarred Nifong) because he focused on the public statements of the enablers of this hoax instead on dwelling on their private thoughts and the multitudes of private conversations that went on at Duke. Whatever.
No. You’ve misread, missed the point, and about the supposed “moral equivalence,” ignored both my implicit and explicit statements to the contrary. But like you say, whatever.
The BS alarms in this case never cease and are not confined to just those that you mention. It is interesting that a lawyer is quick to point out things that set off a BS alarm, when it is coming from the opposite side. This vast consortium of conspirators lawsuit for example, gets my BS meter screaming. The vile email explained away as having no other motivation than a sarcastic literary reference to American Psycho. The accidental, last minute, serendipitous discovery of the ‘hidden’ DNA in the DNASI report is another. The defense team dropping the motion to have Nifong removed from the case just before the December 15th hearing explained as some sort of gesture of goodwill. There was a lot of slinging of BS back and forth in this case, some of the BS being unlikely but possible and other BS being very unlikely and almost impossible. The blind acceptance of the absolute truth of some of this BS is another story entirely.
KC does a good job of framing his bullshit in a way that makes it seem that there is no possible other explanation to any of his conclusions. Some of the folk he picks on are not quite as adept at bullshitting. Perhaps they lack the experience KC has.
Yeah, I’m sure anyone who’s been following the case for a long time can make a long list of bullshit. I made no effort at completeness! I think the only sensible assumption is that nobody has a perfect bullshit detector and it makes a lot of sense to pay some attention to the ones that are tuned very differently from our own, and those often belong to people we have fundamental disagreements with. But that’s starting to sound like a platitude—everyone’s bullshit detector is different in its own special way. Anybody thinking about writing a children’s book?
I’ve now read Prof. Leiter’s blog posting critiquing KC’s critique of the Ad of 88. I’ve also read his CV, prompted by your description of him.
He seems to be quite the scholar. Looking over his CV, I can say most assuredly that should I ever require an expert on the influence of Nietzsche on American law, I know who I want. If I can digress a moment, I should say that as an undergraduate, many of my electives were spent in philosophy courses. (One of the benefits of being a journalism major is that you have more elective hours than anyone else.) As a result I became quite familiar with Nietzsche – at least, as familiar as one could become at the university before being required to read him in the original German. I liked Nietzsche and thought he made more sense than most 19th century European thinkers – though it must be said that given my opinion of the overall caliber of 19th century European philosophy this is indeed only faint praise.
Continuing through his CV, I see that Prof. Leiter went to Princeton in 1980 at the age of 17 (or even 16?) and he seems to have remained in the embrace of academia ever since. I am jealous of him. I always wanted to “live a life of the mind” – so much, in fact, that as a youngster I used to think that a long prison sentence might be worthwhile because with my basic needs taken care of, I would be free to read, read, read. (An idea of doing the same thing through the academy never crossed my mind. I came from such an extensive line of farmers that when in 1989 my bride-to-be was sending out wedding invitations, she commented, “Everyone in your family lives on ‘Rural Route something’”.)
As I think I’ve mentioned to you before, I went to law school at a late age – I was nearly 36 when I started. Thus, most of my classmates were years younger. The youngest were 14 or more years younger. I remember thinking that must be an interesting life – “Wow , straight from kindergarten to law review without a single break from school”. Given his obvious intellect and energy, Prof. Leiter’s future progress up the academic ladder may create a life, “Straight from kindergarten to law dean.”
The academy’s continual rewards (amply justified) to Prof. Leiter may account for his admirable loyalty to the profession and may be what led him to defend the Duke professors who attacked their students. I understand loyalty, and if I will be indulged another digression, I have a confession. When Mike Nifong was under siege from the state ethics commission and by the court for contempt, I was probably the most sympathetic member of KC’s Sunshine Band. I know how lawyers can get “tunnel vision” when they have a “great case”. In this vein, I would urge you to watch the movie, A Civil Action, starring John Travolta and Robert Duvall. If you do, you will come to the scene where you will want to grab Travolta’s character by the lapels and shout, “They’re offering you $20 million – take it and drop the case!” Similarly, there were times during the lacrosse case when one might have wished to grab Nifong by his lapels and shout, “You’ve won the election – drop the case!”
Now turning, finally, to Prof. Leiter’s critique of KC Johnson. When you first informed me that a eminent law professor was defending the Ad of 88, my first thoughts turned to the Pennzoil vs. Texaco lawsuit. In that case, Pennzoil had made a deal to buy a smaller oil company. They just needed to “put the ribbon on the package”. Then Texaco swooped in at the last minute and bought the company. Pennzoil sued Texaco for, essentially, tortious interference with a contract. Texaco defended with law professors who told the jurors, in essence, as a matter a law “a ‘(mere) deal’ is not an ‘(exalted) contract’”. They might be able to awe first-year law students into believing that, but the jury awarded a record $10 billion in damages.
Then I read Prof. Leiter’s piece. As I told you in a previous comment, that ad was the kind of thing that prompts jurors to ask, “How much is ‘every last cent the defendant has’?” In a trial, Duke could get all the professors it likes to argue – as Prof. Leiter does — that “the ad wasn’t really about the lacrosse incident”. The jury would award massive damages. (Interestingly, another “real world” lawyer wrote to Prof. Leiter to raise the same points that I have. Prof. Leiter’s dismissive treatment of that lawyer’s arguments would have been as effective as Texaco’s law professors’ treatment of Pennzoil’s arguments.)
Prof. Leiter’s case against KC is basically that KC makes his case by “taking snippets of the ad out of the context of the whole ad”. But the same criticism can be made of Prof. Leiter: His defense of the ad ignores the context – the daily protests, etc. – in which it was made. That ad was gasoline on a fire. It reminds me of a comment made by someone who raised the case of French Capt. Alfred Dreyfus who was a Jew charged with treason in the 1890s. The commenter said it was as if leading members of the French military had – in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair – had taken out a similar ad to the Ad of 88 and then claimed they didn’t mean to affect Dreyfus specifically, but just decrying the distressing lack of patriotism among Jews generally. Who’s going to believe that?
I hope I’ve shown why I think that Prof. Leiter, while admirably defending his profession, has not made a strong case. At any rate, I have promised not to post on your blog again before finishing this comment and one about Prof. Neal. I will do the comment on Prof. Neal next.
When I responded to Prof. Anderson’s misconceptions about the Scottsboro Boys case, you raised the report of Miss Hollace Randall. I was first inclined to write a comment about Miss Randall but didn’t for two reasons: (1) she’s a woman, and (2) she’s deceased. With my upbringing to not attack women or the dead, this combination led me to decide to let Miss Randall go undisturbed. But if I had her on a witness stand in the 1930s, I would’ve made it the worst day of her life.
Finally, I notice that you’ve used one of my comments to make some points in a recent post. I will comment on that once I have made good on my pledge to comment on Prof. Neal first.
RRH
Well, I can’t argue with you about juries, or at least there wouldn’t be much point. But Leiter is blogging primarily for an academic and legal-academic audience. If he wanted to convince a jury, I imagine he’d express himself differently, and if he couldn’t express himself differently, smart real-world lawyers would presumably not put him up on the stand. Anyway, I’m not very warm to the idea that if I want to puzzle out what that (or any) text communicates I should ask myself what a jury would make of it.
It’s true that Leiter doesn’t attend to the real-world context at the time the ad was published, but he never pretends to be doing anything other than a textual analysis. I agree that to address the significance of the ad and the judgment of those who endorsed it, you have to consider the context it was published into. For that it would be good to start with a realistic picture of what was going on. There were several large rallies on or near campus and there were some very shrill and foolish protests. I’ve said several times that I think we should have heard some criticism and repudiation of the excesses of those protests from professors who endorsed the ad. But daily protests? I don’t think so—I didn’t see any when I was on campus. Gasoline on the flames is a stretch, too. The big rallies on campus and the potbanging had been done a week or so before the ad came out, and there was no upsurge in protests after it was printed.
Prof. Leiter does seem to be rocketing up the ladder of academic success—it looks like he’s just moved from UT Austin to Chicago.
Please allow me to edit the last post. It should say
A source of a lot of frustration for the defenders of the Lax guys has been the tendency of so many on the other side to simply ignore the meaning and the implications of the State AG choosing to use the word “innocent” to in referrence to the case. I really seems to me that a reasonable person would not thereafter try to attach any special meaning to anything like the Mcfadden email. So what if it expressed some anger? Or a lot of anger. It is not a crime to be angry at someone who just ripped you off. And how could anyone criticise the actions of the defense team? What is the point? For what it is worth, they could afford to have been honest because they never needed to lie about anything. They would win best the quicker information got out. The word is “innocent”.
As to the question of whether our blog owner ascribed moral equivalence between Nifong and KC. If the blog owner wants his readers to clearly understand that he means to avoid ascribing moral equivalence why does he choose to describe KC as a “prosecutor” who uses deceptive and under-handed techniques - words that are indelibly linked to M. Nifong?
I’m glad you decided to rewrite. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the other one.
As to prosecutor, I’ve said what I mean about that and it’s up to my readers to understand or not. The title of the post (“KC Johnson: the other Duke Lacrosse prosecutor”).
I think it’s revealing that your assumption, when you see that I’m suggesting that there are parallels between Johnson and a criminal prosecutor like Nifong, you jump straight to “moral equivalence.” What kind of dimwit would suggest that hounding a bunch of professors in a blog is the moral equivalent of trying to send three people to jail for a crime they didn’t commit? I expect you disagree with my analogy—so fine, disagree.
There’s no denying that the most prominent and vocal of the faculty he criticizes did nothing overt to break the mold–they stuck close to their issues or were silent, so Johnson is fully justified in sticking to his guns as well. “
I agree. But here’s the main difference I see between your harsh evaluation of KC’s “contributions” to this case and the “contributions” of the Duke faculty who joined the fray. The “back and forth” rhetoric on the subject of left wing faculty agendas or Campus Culture seems to me (an outsider) as a “family feud.” No one really stands to be harmed by this exchange and indeed, no member of the “88” has suffered harm, professional or otherwise. Receiving nasty Emails is indeed unpleasant (I did not enjoy the “messages I received online either) but is perhaps the ticket price for entering this contentious situation. But KC’s “prosecution” of the 88 did not put any one of them in jeopardy of losing 30 years of their lives. It does not ramp up a situation where, as one Lacrosse Mom told me…over 1000 death threats were received by her family in a week.
The debate over Campus Culture preceded this Lacrosse debacle and will go on. To most of us outside academia , it arouses no anger of the intensity that armed hate groups decide to try to come to campus or faculty feel they must sleep in their cars. The Listening Ad, however, and those who offered 88 signatures were at the very least reckless both in wording and timing. The sensitivities of the Black students on campus are, of course, important to acknowledge, but NOT at the most dangerous and vulnerable time for the safety and public perception of the Lacrosse team. Look at the wording…these are professors whose livelihood is words…whose profession is communication. How reckless to put up a public statement so unclear, so provocative, if that was NOT their intent! How reckless to not consider how those words might be viewed in the media feeding frenzy of hate and condemnation that was enveloping those boys before the most basic facts of the case were even available. How contemptible to lie , as Davidson did, that the boys were enveloped in a cocoon of campus sympathy that had to be countered in the early weeks of this case! That is not just “bullshit”…. that is the most hurtful deceitful denial of the pain these kids and families faced! She is denying the authenticity of what they endured to provide cover for HERSELF!
Then came the op-eds, opinion pieces, and Letters to the Editor. You have correctly outlined the “bullshit.” But you try to make some “moral equivalent” to the harm they did to public perception of these kids and the supposed “harm” KC has done to them. To the “Something Happened” crowd, these boys will always be thought guilty of a heinous rape or rape cover-up. What the worst that one might think of some signatory of the Listening AD? What burden, what smear do they carry for life?
These Duke Profs made a decision to go into print about this case and in almost every case, it reverberated to the detriment of the public perception of the Lacrosse team at the most dangerous time. THEY CHOSE to do this. Some of these kids just showed up at a party their captains called. They did NOT all know or vote on the hiring of strippers. They did not walk over there intending to denigrate Black womanhood. But now, in some circles, they are branded racists, rapists or both.
KC chose to stand up for these kids when they had little if any support. No professor at Duke decided to take on that DAILY role. Only a handful of Duke profs ever found an occasional voice to articulate against the prosecutorial sham that was unfolding before them. The silence spoke volumes to those observing from afar. To those who believed the lying Nifong and his enabling media friends, it was telling that “their own professors” …”those who KNEW them best” had nothing to say in their defense. Nothing.
To those who knew the boys to be innocent, that Faculty silence was cold, callous, self-absorbed and indicative of an emotional disinterest in the welfare of these Duke students. Individually, one by one, Duke faculty …like Kitty Genovese’s NYC neighbors… watched a crime unfold before them and shut the blinds.
There is no moral equivalency between KC’s Campus Culture critique of some professors and any “consequence” they face because of his “prosecution” and the harm that the negative PUBLIC outpouring of articles from certain professors and the almost universal SILENCE on the part of the others conveyed upon the Lacrosse Team. When each of these Professors joined the fray, THEY KNEW that jail time, ruined reputations, threats and hysteria were very real consequences these boys faced AS THEY WROTE. They knew this and poured gasoline on the fire anyway. Others watched them and knowing the very same things, chose to make NO attempt to counter or ameliorate the situation.
This, frankly, disgusts me. Would you have preferred KC stay silent too? Does his “prosecution” of those who recklessly entered a tumultuous situation and increased the danger to these young men really annoy you more than the action and or inaction of the Duke faculty in this case?
And to Mark… I believe Discovery in the civil trial will allow you to see the 15 or so Emails that surround the McFayden Email…that make it absolutely clear that:
On LS , we have been discussing this and other curious “coincidences” at that time. Sane Nurse “Kethra” on our Board points out:
“I would love to know about the “towel” that magically appears in the altered SANE fantasy novelette that Levicy puts together the DAY before Crystal (who in the hell waits a month to take a victims statement) remembers the towel in her formal statement. I find it fascinating that the towel was never mentioned until DNASI finds Evans DNA on it even though they never find his DNA anywhere else… ever.
So not only was Crystal coached, so was Levicy. I say this because as a SANE I am NEVER told about additional evidence that is removed from the scene. I rarely talk to anyone until and unless it goes to trial after my initial report is made. I have never had an investigator call me and say “hey you know we found xyz at the scene”.
Snip
DNASI does the towel, notifies Nifong that DNA matching David Evans found around March 30th (no match to Mangum however).
Tara Levicy shows up with her “amended” SANE narrative (against all known or imagined policy, procedure or guidelines) that NOW mentions the whole wiping off with the towel on April 5.
Mangum gives her written statement that magically matches Levicy’s word for word (that does NOT happen) and includes the towel April 6.
I think the 3 occurrences above are just a bit too pat to be believable.”
Others point out that after Crystal has failed in several attempts to make identification, on April 3 her Father Travis announces on National TV THE NIGHT BEFORE THE LAST LINE-UP…that she has picked three. Next day, April 4, she looks again and finds three (actually four) to ID.
On April 5 the NYT runs piece devoted to Finnerty, who has been selected the day before not yet been publicly named (setting up the ground for him to be seen as having a potential for violence?)
Why should Finnerty have been selected out of a possible 46 other players, for a single NYT piece devoted to him?
(Did someone have inside or advance word that he was to be selected?)
This is why we need these civil trials. There must be explanation, exposure and consequence.
OK, there you go again. If it really helps you to write these tirades, I guess that’s OK. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one, except that I think you might consider challenging yourself to criticize what people really say instead of what you think they said. Here’s a couple of examples.
As far as “moral equivalence” goes, look at my response to Ralph DuBose.
“This vast consortium of conspirators lawsuit for example, gets my BS meter screaming. The vile email explained away as having no other motivation than a sarcastic literary reference to American Psycho.”
Help me out here:
Mark, what “motivation” do you ascribe to that Email ?
“Motivation” implies a move toward an intended action. What “action” do you suspect here?
Since there was no rape (you do believe now that there was no rape, don’t you?) what “motivation” could you think Ryan and those answering him had in mind?
I might ask how you… or anyone…. can ascribe anything to that Email without seeing the others before and after…that put it in context? What you THINK you know now cannot possibly be a complete picture without context, can it?
But you seem to believe, EVEN AT THIS POINT, that Ryan had some other “motivation.” for writing it other venting and tasteless frat-boy humor?
If we were to hack into private Email exchanges late at night of Duke’s basketball team or some post-fraternity party attendees of any hue…what kind of exchanges do you believe you’d see..some prayer chain or “Goodnight John-boy?”
If some legal entity with a “motivation” of his own…allowed you to spy tonight all over the Web at what young men of all colors and types write to their contemporaries…would you have widespread equal, LASTING disdain for all of them? Would you contemplate nefarious “motivations?”
How “different” are these Lacrosse players than you believe other guys are of their age? I suggest you volunteer in a local high school…read what is written in the men’s rooms, on the lockers, on the margins of the notebooks. Listen to how young men of all colors speak to each other, their girlfriends, and folks they both respect and disrespect. Listen to the lyrics of their music. Then you and I can discuss “vile” discourse in a broader context. We can discuss “motivations.” You can tell me why the Lacrosse team was treated as if they invented Stripper parties and “vile” Emails.
Maybe you can explain the overkill of condemnation for THESE particular boys…
THIS reflexive revulsion of yours , this enduring willingness to ascribe the worst possible “motivation”or explanation to these young men…is an example of the very real and permanent damage to every member of that team the civil suits will address.
Uh, Mark, just what do you think was the purpose of the McFadyen email? Was he really planning a murder, or did it really refer to the book American Psycho? (You might want to gander at the replies, as they followed the AP theme.)
The release of this email — which was private correspondence — was done for no other reason than to convince everyone in Durham that these lacrosse players were horrible, murderous people who surely must have been guilty of rape. Yet, we know now — and we knew then — what the email represented and what the truth about this case really was.
Your theme has been (1) there was no rape, but (2) the lacrosse players were so singularly horrible that they deserved everything they got and more. Both are a lie, even if you cannot admit the second one.
There is something else that no one has addressed, and that is the criminal conduct of the police, prosecutors, and DUMC personnel, namely Tara Levicy. Some real-live crimes (which the ancients once called felonies) were committed here, and from my reading of this blog, it seems that you and others think that was just fine. After all, you reason, these were horrible kids and so if police fabricate charges, lie to grand juries, lie to judges and everyone else, well that is just fine by you.
By the way, have you ever read some of the feminist blogs or other political blogs? The comments I have read on them make the McFadyen email look pretty tame. However, it seems that you are shocked, SHOCKED by the email, which strikes me as a bit strange, given your association with the hard left political groups in your area.
I have been around the block a few times, and I can tell you that a number of people in Durham who are in official positions of trust not only lied, but openly and willfully broke the law. I do find it strange that “good government” people like you believe that is perfectly acceptable.
Is it not strange that many of the same people who complain about the lawbreaking that goes on in the Bush administration and are demanding that scores of people go to jail are just fine with what happened in Durham? I hate to tell you, but lying to grand juries, fabricating medical reports, lying to judges, seeking false indictments, and the like are crimes. They are just as illegal as anything done by the Bushies, but from what I can tell, the good lefties of Durham are OK with official lawbreaking just as long as people who do not fall into “politically correct” categories are the targets.
I guess this is directed at me from the third paragraph on. It’s hard to tell, because most of what’s tied to the words “you” or “your” is bullshit (“Your theme has been…”, “it seems that you and others think…” “After all, you reason,…”, “given your association…”). I suppose that at least makes it on-topic.
You are cranky today aren’t you?
Here’s my deal with Davidson:
“The ad said that we faculty were listening to the anguish of students who felt demeaned by racist and sexist remarks swirling around in the media and on the campus quad in the aftermath of what happened on March 13 in the lacrosse house.
The insults, at that time, were rampant. “
SWIRLING. RAMPANT.
I just went with the visual…”swirling, RAMPANT remarks”…a vertible “cocoon ” in my mind’s eye….SWIRLING across campus in adoring, blind loyalty to the beloved Lacrosse team…as women and minorities were “anquished” by RAMPANT attacks on them.
Such is Davidson’s scenario of Springtime at Duke U 2006.
HUH?
This is the entirety of RAMPANT SWIRLING abuse she encountered on campus at that time? No other comments, or placards or wanted posters SWIRLED her way? Nothing?
There are none so blind as those who WILL NOT SEE. Or see beyond their own blind bias…
I’m sorry if I misquoted her; at least my reckless words will not cause her to have to sleep in her car.
Yeah, I guess I’m gonna have to be cranky on this one. Hopefully it’s better than sarcastic. There’s nothing to apologize for, though. I’m not Davidson’s enforcer or her PR agent—you can feel however you want about her and her editorial. Ayway, my suggestion is simple. Davidson claims that demeaning remarks were being made by people she saw as defenders of the lacrosse team. There’s nothing in the editorial about adoring, blind loyalty. Offhand, people who thought the best way to defend or support the lacrosse players was to insult minority students don’t sound to me like an adoring, cocooning crowd. Why isn’t it enough to be mad about the things Davidson really wrote?
I do not like to become argumentative about specific word choices. However, my complaint here is this: If you really wanted your readers to understand your point about no-moral-equivalence (and have them believe you meant it) I have trouble with the idea that you would choose the word “prosecutor” and others denoting dishonestly to label KC. My sense of this whole matter is that the distribution of guilty motives and actions between M. Nifong and KC Johnson is so extremely unbalanced (to the advantage of KC) that a fair description of them would not need to be amended or qualified with a “I do not mean they are morally equivalent” in the first place.
This has the same queasy-making feel about it as Mr. Red Mountain raising vague questions about the motivations behind the now infamous email. Of course, he can easily deny that he meant that they are actually criminal/rapists but since they are well known to be innocent, what is the point? Why start down a road of hints and allegations when everybody already knows it is a dead end? If you guys do not want to seem to be ascribing any moral equivalence to the two sides of this saga, use words that do the job instead of ones that tend to keep the water muddy.
Prosecutor is the word that means what I want to say. Inquisitor would work, too, but it’s kind of melodramatic. Prosecutors, even responsible ones—and it’s not a dirty work, you know—present evidence so that their audience can pronounce on guilt or innocence. An analyst, which is what Johnson claims to be, is supposed to serve up a broader, less agenda-driven understanding.
Professor Zimmerman,
I will admit to enjoying both your posts and your hospitality. Those sentiments alone keep me from expounding at greater length on how demeaned I myself feel by the sexist tendencies SWIRLING around this very blog… for example, when you refer to MY expressions of MY opinions as “tirades” and do not apply such terms to yourself or other male posters here.
Though I myself am the forgiving type, there are Babes in (your neck of the) Duke Woods who lay in wait for casual offenders like yourself.
Enjoy your weekend!
Thanks. Actually it’s Duke Forest, and I try to avoid going in there alone. I checked to see what I’ve used the word “tirade” for, and it’s a very small and select group—you shouldn’t feel singled out by gender on this one.
I’ve scrubbed a few irrelevant comments, as I don’t need the nuisance. They had to do with this. The parting shot from over there is too good to just toss away, though:
Consider yourself urged.
Robert,
The Diva is just giving you a humorous parody of the Vagina Monologues, there is no seriousness in that at all. Just some irony and sarcasm with a bit of humor on the side.
Joan,
The e-mail at the very least shows anger and resentment, just my opinion. It is BS to attempt to explain it away just as sarcasm, again my opinion. I don’t believe it was a suggestion to violence as Bill seems to believe it is possible I feel that way. That would get my BS meter screaming as well. Still it was beyond tasteless and my descriptive of “vile” is where my opinion remains.
Ralph,
I am not raising vague questions about that e-mail and I am sorry you have a ‘queasy’ feeling about my opinion. The e-mail itself gives me the creeps. I just don’t accept the BS, completely humorous and sarcastic literary explanation that is taken as a given by some people. Of the examples I gave of the BS coming from the defense side, it is interesting that that is the one example that gets people in such an uproar. I guess with Mr. Cooney now having gone over to the “Dark Side” and him giving some of his famous B-Spin on how Brodhead ‘helped’ one of the players, perhaps it is just more believable that the defense lawyers had dropped a few BS bombs of their own.
I like the last point. The attorneys who’ve worked on this case have been doing their jobs. Some better than others, for sure. I have to laugh, though, at the way they’re rolled into the good guys/bad guys framework—all the sniping at Gorelick, for instance.
As to “the Diva,” the less said the better, but that’s an interesting bit of info.
Actually, my comment was directed at Red Mountain and others who have tried either to say that “something happened” (that was how the Little Rascals defendants were wrongfully convicted, and “something happened” has no place in law) or that the lawbreaking by people from Durham and Duke was no big deal.
In other words, if police, prosecutors, and hospital personnel commit felonies in the name of pushing a certain political agenda, then they get a free pass. What I would hope is that people would want real justice and real commitment to rule of law, and not see law as a convenient weapon by which to make political points.
I have been a very harsh critic of the Bush administration’s assault on the law. (The Sami Al-Arian case by itself is proof that this administration makes up the law as it goes along.)
But, from what I read from certain people on this blog, and from Durham, is that since the defendants in the Duke case were not of the “proper” political backgrounds, whatever police and Nifong did was acceptable. Now, would you, Prof. Zimmerman, support fabrication of evidence to convict BLACK defendants of rape? My guess is that you would not, but you and your “progressive” friends in Durham are willing to give corrupt police and prosecutors a free pass when they do it to people you don’t like.
To me, that is unacceptable. I have tried (feebly, I admit) to be even-handed in the way I approach justice issues, and my Lewrockwell.com archive I think demonstrates that I have tried to support the causes of justice of people of all income, racial, and political backgrounds. I guess that in your view, that makes me a racist. So be it.
Thanks for the clarification. Sometimes it’s hard to tell in these comment threads. But then you do it again—more bullshit! I’d never brand someone as a racist for supporting “the causes of justice of people of all income, racial, and political backgrounds.” And the related question is too ridiculous to dignify with an answer.
Any comment on the “coincidences” I posted about the case in general?
Actually, I feel applying the word “tirade” to my posting is the language of male dominance, an example of elitist professorial privilege wherein an historically undervalued housewife…new to blogging…finds her thoughts defined and demeaned by gender bias code-words that carry a message of emotional excess signaling to like minded others to render them without merit or consequence.
Just saying…
I understood what you were saying—good thing I didn’t call you bitchy or whiny, huh? I have confidence that you’ll overcome and carry on.
I honestly don’t have any insight about those coincidences—anything I said would be uninformed speculation.
Sorry for splitting my reply, Robert. I also wanted to respond to Joan’s other question, which I feel is a legitimate one: “I might ask how you… or anyone…. can ascribe anything to that Email without seeing the others before and after…that put it in context? What you THINK you know now cannot possibly be a complete picture without context, can it?”
I wanted to find a post of yours that came to mind when you asked me that question. It dealt with Robert Steel and a quote from a bit of a conversation he had with Jason Trumpbour. I believe it was something like “It would be best for Duke if the three players went to trial. If convicted they can sort it out on appeal.” In that post you stated: “I’ve really tried to think of an alternative take on Chairman Steel’s words. Not to excuse or defend him but just because they astound me. I don’t know people who think like this. Maybe I don’t move in the proper exalted circles.
Thank God.”
I wonder what the context was for that quote of Steel’s? In any case, regardless of the context, it is hard to defend. He certainly sounds heartless and angry.
I feel the same way about that e-mail, Joan. It astounds me. It sounds heartless and angry. Still, you may be right about the context. Perhaps the discovery will not only shed some light on the context of the e-mail, but also the context of Steel’s quote.
Your comment elsewhere:
I think you are missing the point that I am making, Joan. My opinion in relation to the Bullshit topic, is that the completely harmless, innocent, humorous, literary reference interpretation of that e-mail is hard for me to swallow.
Well, Mark, of course, these guys did not come home from that tumultuous evening and begin a Oprah’s Book Club late night discourse on the literary merits of “American Psycho.” Is that what you think we all have been implying?
Really?
No, like the not-to-be mentioned Diva, they were taking quotes and allusions and using them to make some “clever” repartee…yes, to show their anger, disgust, etc. As in the “Diva” quote, they knew the other guys in their class “would get it.”
A quick example, in my real life I do not use profanity. I tell my children its a sign of an impoverished vocabulary. Now someone could lift my posts here and say I was expressing myself with the word “bullshit” publicly on the Internet. But we know how and why I chose to use it on this thread, don’t we? That does put my “conversion” in a different light.
These kids were reading a book that referenced “strippers”; they’d had an ugly night with strippers…so…the “joke was…hey, guys, lets do what the guy in the book we’re reading does.
Do I “approve?’ No, but I do not approve of using “bullshit” in a public forum either…yet here I am. I don’t even approve of teaching trash like “American Pyscho” at Duke in the first place. But Duke wants our kids to read those ideas, those words.
And I am neither nineteen nor teed off nor trying to impress the guys.
IMO the way that Email was used was more obscene than its contents , Mark. It was approved and released as a media distraction when Nifong realized he had no Player DNA in a three orifice rape.It was a tool to provide cover for a false prosecution that a Prosecutor KNEW had no credible evidence. It was used to sustain a Frame.
It was used to intimidate a nineteen year old to be frightened enough to perhaps lie and implicate innocent friends.
It was used to malign that young man’s reputation …to paint him as a sadist, a monster who was making that comment in deadly earnest.
The media grabbed it out of context and without explanation…and spun it into a serious threat, a sick desire to mutilate strippers..every word parsed to its most violent potential.
The media made it live for days. It defined the boys on the Team to the World.
Strange that none of the Duke professors who teach that course popped up to say, “Nah! Wait! I get it. I teach this stuff.”
So, Mark, have you a son? Suppose some dopey night he paraphrases some rap lyrics to a friend straight from one of those artistic musical endeavors that reference killing “cops”, calling women “hos”. Think about it. Some legal entity taps into his private Email and uses THOSE lyrics to define YOUR SON to the world.
You know that’s not him. Nothing like him.You find the words, the ideas… ugly, juvenile…but should he be branded “vile” forever by some stranger infected as YOU have been by early media? Should he bear the burden of those words for the rest of his life?
Look how you STILL react to those words. The McFayden family received over 1000 death threats the week after the Nifong-Stephens stunt.
Think of it! Imagine yourself in their place. Just so Nifong could keep this going through the Election cycle.
They were going to break this kid. They had ALL the emails. They knew the context. They KNEW it was no threat.
That is the most “vile” aspect in this story.
Think of having YOUR child endure this. Never be able to get out from under those misunderstood words. Fair-minded people like you who still brand Ryan with those words prove the necessity of the civil suits.
Is Steel’s quote a literary reference, a rap refrain? If I’ve missed it, let me know. Otherwise , help me out here….what other way can we parse the meaning of those two sentences?
“It would be best for Duke if the three players went to trial. If convicted they can sort it out on appeal.”
Help me…anyone? Anyone?
I’ve gotten into the habit, when these infamous lacrosse-case lines come up, of trying to find the source. According to Joan Foster (where have I heard that name before?), the line about what’s “best for Duke” is from Jason Trumpbauer’s report of a conversation he had with Steel (no ‘e’ at the end, btw). I didn’t find Trumpbauer’s own account of the conversation—if anyone has a link, please share. I certainly consider him a credible source, but still, I’m wary of drawing any conclusions about a quote like this without seeing it more in context. And that’s not because I think Steel meant something different and more benign than his many critics think he meant, it means that I don’t feel like I know what he meant, period.
To Mr. Red Mountain
I have not commented on the other subjects that you say smell of bullshit to you because they have to do with the private thoughts and intentions of the boys legal team. First of all, I cannot bring myself to care - they are lawyers hired by one side and its their job to use any ruse that does not create new crimes of their own even when the client is guilty. Second of all, the lawyers tried hard at the start to present their best case to Nifong which he rejected. Later on, when the State took over the case they opened their files to them. How often does this happen? And how pointless is it therefore to ascribe deviousness to them in this case?
As for the title of Most Perfect Bullshit, I nominate your repeated posing the question of what that email really meant. Because we know that you know that none of those guys did one harmful thing to Mangum. And so we know that you know it meant nothing - could mean nothing. I also strongly suspect that you have not forgotten how 19 year old guys create their humor. And so on yet another level, you are just bullshitting us about it.
Joan,
You said: “So, Mark, have you a son? Suppose some dopey night he paraphrases some rap lyrics to a friend straight from one of those artistic musical endeavors that reference killing “cops”, calling women “hos”. Think about it. Some legal entity taps into his private Email and uses THOSE lyrics to define YOUR SON to the world.”
I can’t count the number of times both you and cecilia have used that in a post. Since you either haven’t been listening or you just want to use that for the purpose of propping up your post, I don’t think I am going to respond to that again.
You said: “….but should he be branded “vile” forever by some stranger infected as YOU have been by early media? Should he bear the burden of those words for the rest of his life?”
I said the e-mail was vile. Good people are capable of sending ‘vile’ e-mails. I don’t think I went quite as far as you did in taking Steel’s statements and projecting that as a defining example of his character.
You said: “These kids were reading a book that referenced “strippers”; they’d had an ugly night with strippers…so…the “joke was…hey, guys, lets do what the guy in the book we’re reading does.”
I would hope nobody laughed at that joke.
You said: “It was approved and released as a media distraction when Nifong realized he had no Player DNA in a three orifice rape.It was a tool to provide cover for a false prosecution that a Prosecutor KNEW had no credible evidence. It was used to sustain a Frame.”
I agree.
Mr. Dubose,
You said: “First of all, I cannot bring myself to care - they are lawyers hired by one side and its their job to use any ruse that does not create new crimes of their own even when the client is guilty.”
As to the “hidden DNA”, it will certainly play a major part in several of the civil suits. It is certainly important both to Meehan and to DNASI at least if they remain as defendants in the lawsuits and the case/cases go to trial without being settled beforehand. It was also a major factor in the downfall of Nifong. Exactly how ‘hidden’ it was could be an important fact in dispute.
The e-mail may be important as well. I tend to agree with Joan on the use of this e-mail as a tool by Nifong, and the circumstances regarding how it was obtained and who provided it to the DA/DPD could be very important.
There is some BS in a few of my previous posts, you are very perceptive in that regard. However, there are many people that take a much more dim view of that e-mail than I do. And some see it as completely innocent. Perhaps the motivation behind this e-mail was important only so long as it had a connection to the case against the players. In that regard, I think you (and Joan) have made a valid point. Please consider however, that by becoming part of one of these lawsuits, the writer of that e-mail is knowingly throwing it out there for further discussion and public view.
Mark, has this become a contest where you won’t give because you think I won’t give?
I am asking you to have a little compassion for these kids and their families. To see them as no better than but NO WORSE than…most other young men of ANY HUE in their age group. To weigh their errors against what, for months and months, they had to endure. Not to canonize them. Never.
Since you say you often read my Liestopper posts…you may have read the one called “Overkill.”
http://liestoppers.blogspot.com/2007/02/overkill.html
I feel like I could have written this to you.
Here’s part of what I said on Feb.17, 2007:
I have never made excuses for the party, the “white shirt” comment. Never.
I never tried to “perfect” these guys. I am a Stage 3 Mother who learned the hard way that those who assume they have the recipe for raising perfect children are almost always left with a serving of humble pie.
I react to the disdain in your posts, the high-toned sneer whenever you reference these kids. I believe there is something about these boys that makes you feel they can never have suffered enough, never should receive one whit of compassion, and always should carry some permanent stain on their record of life from that party.
Am I wrong?
Jason Trumpbour made that comment on the old LS…which cannot be linked to now.
He posted…
But it is referenced in this 2007 article and in the civil suit.
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/gaynor/071016
Thanks for the info—it’s nice to have a research staff. The post by Stuart Rojstaczer that Gaynor points to is good, too:
“I think you are missing the point that I am making, Joan. My opinion in relation to the “Bullshit topic, is that the completely harmless, innocent, humorous, literary reference interpretation of that e-mail is hard for me to swallow.”
By the way, Mark, it was “harmless” in that they were not planning to inflict physical harm on anyone; it was “innocent” since it neither preceded nor followed any crime; and it was “humorous” in the manner of dark humor associated with so much of the culture our children are surrounded with these days. And it was indeed a “literary reference.”
So what else bothers you?
More quotes and links on Steele:
http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2008/02/new-revelations-from-civil-suits.html
Jason Trumbour writing at FODU:
http://friendsofdukeuniversity.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html
Oct. 4, 2007
You know, I appreciate your hospitality. Most of the comments up put up are not warm and fuzzy affirmations of your own views. And you write well. And so I respect all of that.
But when you say you do not understand what Steels statement meant regarding the benefits to Duke if the three innocent LAX guys were to face the horror of a trial you make me wonder yet again why you are doing this. That comment of yours sounds as strange and un-natural as if you were a hostage or POW and were reading prepared propaganda at gunpoint. Is that it? Are you being forced by your boss to do this? I remember how American POWs liked to add subtle dashs of absurdity to propaganda works they were forced to participate in to alert fellow country-men that they did not really agree with the ideas expressed.
I say this because Steels comment (if accurately reported) is a perfect fit with the public actions of Duke at that time and a perfect fit with the obvious self interest Duke had in placating many powerful constituencies that would have been explosively angry at anything that looked like Dukes influence behind the case being dropped - iows the only safe outcome for Duke was it not be dropped. This is not hard to see. So, saying you are not sure about the context or the meaning of that statement is about absurd as an American POW pretending to be unable to correctly pronouce the name of their own hometown.
I don’t have any trouble understanding what the significance and meaning would be if Steel said that it would be “best for Duke if the three players went to trial. If convicted they can sort it out on appeal.” That’s how Joan put it, but it’s not an exact quote—there are no quotes of the conversation. It’s likely that if I could listen to a recording of it or read a transcript, I’d come to somewhat different conclusions that Trumpbauer. Offhand, whatever Steel said seems to have been grossly misguided at best.
On 10/4/2007 Jason Trumbour posted this on the FODU blog:
I consider Jason Trumpbour to be perfectly reliable. He has been prudent and cautious with all of his public statements. At least one reader of this blog is aware that I’ve kidded him about in the past about his caution. It’s hard to believe that Lubiano/Hardt/Weigman cofused Jason and FODU with the Association for Truth and Fairness. But then the host receives a large number of comments directed not at what he wrote but to what think he wrote.
Good points. I have a minor quibble with Trumpbauer that will show up on my next post, but he doesn’t seem like a person who would misrepresent a conversation like this. And I agree about FODU and the Association for Truth and Fairness. FODU was the first lacrosse-case web site I looked at, and I did get the impression that it and ATF were two wings of the same general enterprise. But the fundamentally different purpose and tone of each was obvious, too.
Look, you can accuse me of b.s.-ing you all you like, but let us not forget that Durham’s finest have been feeding us b.s. for more than two years. Let us count the ways:
We were told that since some plantation owners had raped female slaves, that was PROOF that Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans were guilty of rape;
William Chafe told his readers (I guess with a straight face) that the proper “narrative” by which to view the rape accusations was the murder of Emmett Till. Now, I am not sure how Reade Seligmann can be linked to Roy Bryant, but there was a distinguished resident of Durham (and one of your fellow faculty members) solemnly telling us that was so;
“Our Hearts World.” Yes, I would read that website once in a while, you know the one put up by Cash Michaels that swore the three young men were guilty, and that anyone who believed in their innocence could do so ONLY because of racial hatred. No b.s. there, oh, no;
The demonstrations and church services held at 610 Buchanan St. Don’t you remember the protestations of the various ministers, and the potbangers, all of whom were tied to the leftist communities of the Durham area? No b.s. there, not at all.
You see, this was a fraud, a frame, a hoax, and that was the source of the rest of the b.s. We were fed a bunch of crap about plantations and rape and all the rest of the various “narratives” that Durhamites love to dump on the rest of the world.
So, say what you will, but there has been enough b.s. produced by the people of Durham over the last two years to fertilize every garden in the world.
More and more, Bill, I read these rants and I just have to scratch my head. Who is this stuff written for? If you’re trying to correct my misimpressions, you might start by reading the post. And do you just like to write Durham a lot, or do you really think we’ve cornered the market on “hard-left” creeps and wackos down here? It’s always seemed like such an ordinary place to me, I don’t know how I missed all that.
I don’t know the context of Steel’s quote either and it is hard to defend. I don’t doubt Trumpbour’s accuracy, but Steel’s words are, in my opinion, open to interpretation. Certainly, it is easy to understand some of the “Best for Duke” attitude. If Duke had from the beginning decided to investigate the accusation itself, it could have been seen as favoring some of it’s own students over a student from NCCU. From that standpoint it was ‘best’ that a third party police force investigate the accusations. It would also have been problematic if Duke was seen as pressuring Nifong and the DPD to drop the charges for similar reasons. The actual ‘conversation’ between Trumpbour and Steel took place in the fall of 2006 (to the best of my knowledge). By that time, I believe it was obvious to everyone that Nifong was going to take this case to trial, regardless of what anybody else thought. Steel may have believed that getting the case dropped wasn’t even a viable option any longer. We have the explanation for the e-mail, and yes Joan, it is easier to understand that in the context of a literary reference. Perhaps the e-mails before and after will give us even more context as to the e-mail. I have not heard Steel’s explanation of this quote but it does appear that KC got a letter of memorandum from Jason, perhaps giving the full details, and it also appears (from UPI source notes) that he interviewed Mr. Steel. I will have to go thru the book again to see if there is more of an explanation here, certainly the civil suits may lead to more on this.
Joan, I don’t consider this a ‘contest’, but I enjoy our back and forth and a good debate. I do feel that calling the tone of my comments ‘high-toned sneer’, or ‘disdain’, is something I do not agree with and I believe that is more of a subjective interpretation on your part. I did read the ‘overkill’ post, a good example of overkill would be the extent to which these lawsuits go in painting everybody named as wanting innocent kids to go to jail. Just my opinion.
Yes, I think those are some of the ways Steel’s comments (as reported by Trumpbauer) may be open to interpretation. It was never my intention to interpret or reinterpret them, so I’ll leave it at that.
I’d like to say a word in defense of our host.
I was drawn emotionally into this case… because I DO try to imagine myself in the other guys shoes…a quality my own Mother possessed and I once despised as a teenager. One of her annoying questions was :”Okay, that’s how YOU see it…but how does it look from the other side.”
That , Mark, is the game of …”If this were my/your son”… that I DO use to help me process my own reactions and to challenge you and others to do the same. For me, in my real life, it has worked very well.
During the case, I read the latest Hoax news or reporting or pontification every morning and imagined they spoke of MY son… imagined Collin, Reade or Dave were mine.I saw my kid in that shot of Reade walking to court… hearing the shouts “You’re a dead man walking!” I imagined picking up the phone… as Kathy Seligmann did… to hear my oldest say, “Mom, be strong. Mom, she picked me.” I imagined the helplessness and hopelessness when Brodhead closed his door to them and Nifong refused to look at exculpatory evidence. Maybe I am programmed funny, but loving MY OWN son… made it so easy to feel… and understand.
That was my impetus to help with the LS blog.
I wrote to Ruth Sheehan early in the case:
Now, lately, when I pop in here… I am thinking of our Host as if HE were my son (The real one has the gift of sarcasm as well)…how far would I push him to criticize his employer, his livelihood, if he were my own? This is his real life. He has a young family.
So I’m thinking about that too.
My Mother’s “Game” is a tough challenge, Mark, for me as well…once you start thinking this way.
So I think giving us a fair chance to just state our perspectives is just fine. It probably is no career enhancer at Duke to be cyber-entertaining Blog Hooligans here…so let’s give him some slack and our sincere respect.
(Was this a “tirade “or a “rant?”)
There’s a classic teenager line that I suspect your son may have fallen back on a time or two—“stop it mom, you’re embarrassing me!” Of course I’m well into middle age and beyond all that.
I’m all for developing the habit of looking at things from the other side. Not just as an emotional exercise but as an intellectual one—not only wondering how it feels to be in some other person’s shoes, but why they see the world in certain ways and hold the opinions they do. In fact I think there should be a balance between the emotional and intellectual perspectives. This is something I might take up in a post one of these days.
I don’t want anyone to feel they should pull their punches, though. If I got really careless or strident I could probably offend someone at Duke so much that they might feel vindictive. Believe it or not, I’d be just as likely to cause myself trouble by pursuing arcane lines of reasoning like this. But it’s not like I’m walking on eggshells, and what I write isn’t being monitored in a big-brotherly way from Duke.
This one is not a rant or a tirade, as I’m sure you know. A JF tirade is much longer and has a lot more upper case.
Jason Trumpbour, first, has worked as a prosecutor, so he had knowledge of the process that most of us outside of law do not. Second, he is a well-respected alumnus of Duke and he had access to high-level people at Duke in settings that were less formal than press conferences or public speeches.
Now, neither of those things means that he automatically interpreted Steel’s words perfectly. I am sure Steel would insist that he did not want innocent people to go to prison, but nonetheless his comments that Jason recalls — a conviction could be overturned on appeal — certainly are chilling, and I would not want someone like that to have any authority over me.
It is clear that neither Steel nor Brodhead seemed intent on making any public defense of their students, even when it was clear that Nifong, Crystal, and the police were lying. My sense is that the “white guilt” that is part of modern Duke University played a part.
Unlike Harvard or the other Ivies, Duke refused to admit blacks until 1961, and I am sure that the old Jim Crow racial prejudices there lasted past then. Now, that does not mean — as William Chafe tried to tell us — that Reade Seligmann was the Second Coming of Roy Bryant, although that is what some on the Duke faculty wanted us to think.
While there is no doubt that the racial laws and attitudes that have hurt blacks over the years are wrong, but it seems to me that what people in Durham were saying was that because Duke did not admit blacks until 47 years ago, therefore (1) Duke today is “racist” and (2) Reade, Collin, and David were guilty and the lacrosse team was a modern version of the Ku Klux Klan.
Certainly, Steel and Brodhead took such attitudes to heart. I recall that Brodhead wrote a letter to a foreign government that was falsely accusing a Duke student of a crime, and he had no qualms about declaring that student innocent and the government’s persecution of that student to be wrong.
However, he could not even get himself to stand up for three Duke students falsely accused in the very city where Duke is located. Furthermore, we had to put up with inane things like Karla Holloway claiming that “white innocence means black guilt” and nonsense like that. (I’m sorry, but “Bodies of Evidence” is ridiculous and reflects the mind of someone who does not see other human beings as people but rather pieces of a narrative puzzle.)
So, accuse me of b.s., accuse me of rants, whatever. Don’t forget that Joan Foster, K.C. Johnson, and I were standing up for those students long before it was fashionable to admit they were falsely accused. And, yet, it seems to me that a lot of people in Durham cannot face up to what they did. They are in good company; Scottsboro, Alabama, did not put up a historical plague dealing with its horrible behavior in the Scottsboro Boys case until 2003.
No doubt, the people of Duke and Durham believe they are morally superior to the people of Scottsboro of the 1930s. The lacrosse case makes me seriously doubt that belief.
As I wrote in my post, I find Chafe’s attempt to link the lacrosse team’s partying behavior to the murder of Emmett Till completely unconvincing, but the connection he makes is nothing if not vague—he says that what happened to Emmett Till “helps to put into context what occurred in Durham two weeks ago” because “the mixture of race and sex that transpired on Buchanan Boulevard is not new.” He doesn’t say or even imply that anyone at the party was “the Second Coming of Roy Bryant.” He wasn’t making that or any other suggestion about Reade Seligmann, since he was writing 3 weeks before Seligmann’s name hit the news. Yet two comments in a row you trot out this ridiculous idea that Chafe singled Seligmann out as a monster. Didn’t you learn anything from Cathy Davidson’s blunder?
So good for you, you were in the vanguard when it was time to stand up for the innocent students. Is that why you feel free to use the name of one of the most widely admired of those students for a little light character assassination?
Thanks, though, for a fine example of why I go looking for the source whenever I read that so-and-so said such-and-such. For some people, it seems like honest criticism is never strong enough.
Again, Mark, it is not just what you say here…but your “membership” elsewhere that colors your words to me.
The Liestoppers came together because they saw an injustice, a false prosecution, so they had a positive reason for their individual participation. WE were trying to accomplish something worthwhile. Isn’t that the kind of endeavor we all wish others would undertake FOR US ..if , God forbid, we fall into some vortex of Fate like these kids?
At times,you may have seen us as rude, or flippant…I’ll grant you that…but the basic cause that united us had real merit. We existed for a POSITIVE purpose. We weren’t there just to mock others and send obscene PMs and write vile posts about innocent kids and their families.
You collectively laughed at the families. You made sport of them. And you, Mark, stayed and stayed.
What GOOD THING did you ever accomplish at the Cave? For what positive cause do you all assemble to write the things you write?
What are obscene photos addressed to me going to accomplish to further my understanding of your position?
Did you approve of all that?
Did you find humor in those things?
Is that the kind of venting that serves some larger purpose?
I have always found you civil and fair. Some of the Hooligans say that my feelings about your fairness would change if I were to read at the Cave as they do.
Is that true?
At last we get an actual defense of Dukes actions and Meehans actions.
For Duke: The email would be considered sufficiently vile by many fair-minded people that cancelling the LAX season would seem justified. I admit, there is something to this. Lots of ordinary middle class people would no doubt be alarmed at that email. The thing is, Duke University was in possession of decisively persuasive evidence of the kids innocence (neg DNA, etc.) at the time they conspired to help release the email into the public domain. Duke was also aware of the texts it required its students to learn from (A.Psycho). Duke was also (be honest) aware of what 19 yr old college humor tends toward- as exemplified by the other emails that day.
As for Meehan. He was hyper-aware from start to finish just how deceptive and hurtful his omissions were to the defendants. He was also hyper-aware just how far from normal, expected, and mandated practice it was to produce a report that left out an abundance of highly relevant material - whether or not Nifong asked him too. If this gets to a fair-minded jury, he and his fiirm will be made an example of such that every DNA testing Lab in the US will speak of this case with fear and trembling for 3 generations.
As to Steels comments: It seems to me that context is all important. I mean, if Duke Univ. had been careful to be neutral in its pronouncements and had made efforts to enforce its own rules against stigmatizing groups of students then the Steel statement would not be so malignant. But the real context - the one Duke had actively created - was quite different. Many things had been done to harm the LAX guys chances with a Durham jury and nothing had been done to restrain the rampant violations of campus rules regarding making prejudicial statements against groups of students.
I agree that what was happening on campus makes Steel’s comments to Trumpbour look especially malignant. But there’s a specific verbal/textual context to the various statements Steel made and those comments are mediated in various ways (e.g., via Trumpbour or a lacrosse parent or in an interview). I suspect that caring about those fussy details is one of the main things that separates honest criticism from self-serving hypocrisy.
You are right in that Chafe did not single Reade out in his article. However, he did compare these kids to Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, and ultimately Reade Seligmann was indicted for the crime that never happened.
So, yes, it is a bit of a stretch I am making, but not overly so. Chafe compared the students to a couple of racist murderers and declared that the context in which to view the alleged events was a murder — and an especially cowardly and evil one at that.
Since Chafe declared with no uncertainty that the alleged event occurred, and that the individuals who did it were channeling Bryant and Milam, then I don’t think it is out of the realm to say he was speaking of Reade.
As for the larger issue, I will repeat what I said before, and that is that the faculty members who made all the noise early never did see these players as people; they were nothing but political symbols to them.
This is a much larger disease that has thoroughly infected higher education. More and more disciplines are viewing events solely through contrived political lenses. Everything that happens is permitted only to be seen in a political context and nothing else.
So, I really was not surprised to see the William Chafes and Karla Holloways and the execrable Houston Baker swing into action. This was their Reichstag Fire, and they saw it as their own attempt to storm the Winter Palace.
Given how all of them have been rewarded by Duke University in the aftermath of this scandal, I would say they were pretty successful.
There is exactly one sentence about Emmett Till in Chafe’s op-ed, and it’s paired with a sentence about a far less violent case:
Those two cases, along with some other generalities, are the things that together “help[] to put into context what occurred in Durham two weeks ago,” according to Chafe. How they help, I don’t know. But what they have in common is definitely not two murderers named Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam—the “kissing case” seems to have been an outrageous and ridiculous miscarriage of justice, but it wasn’t murderous brutality. Your insistence that Chafe “compared the students to a couple of racist murderers” is either delusional, desparate, or dishonest, not to mention just plain dumb.
And Chafe absolutely did not “declare[] with no uncertainty that the alleged event occurred.” He did just the opposite, declaring that his concern was with the things that happened “whether or not a rape took place (and this is an issue that needs to be assessed objectively and with full fairness to everyone).” That may not have been adequate attention of the presumption of innocence, but it’s definitely not a declaration of guilt.
Your real case against Chafe must be pretty weak if you have to rely almost entirely on bullshit to get it across.
Please don’t dismiss Bill’s contributions to this case with a “Good for you.” Because often it wasn’t “good for him.” It is difficult to jump into the fray to defend strangers …at the cost of being called a “racist” on the Internet on a regular basis when your own two beloved sons are Black. You have in the past dismissed this persistant name-calling, but at least please grant that in a case where you have absolutely no self-gain…it takes a real moral commitment to shrug it off and continue to try and speak out and persevere.
For Bill, even at a different university, this was not a popular stance for one who makes his living in academia. The “Good for him” stance would be to have done what almost the entire faculty at Duke did…keep quiet, stay under the radar, watch one’s own back.
That so many chose the latter path is, at very least, a telling demonstration of what most today perceive to be the present parameters of our moral responsibility beyond us and ours.
We’re fortunate there are still folks like Bill who believe in something larger than self-interest. You may not like every argument he makes, but should you find yourself in the clutches of a false prosecution some day, with the Chafe, Lubiano,and Baker-esque comments directed at you, I think you might say it’s “good for YOU’ that folks like Bill care enough to get involved.
I have no desire to dismiss all of Bill’s contributions, and that’s not what I did. I was reacting to an unfortunate juxtaposition in that specific comment. Nothing he’s done in the past gives him carte blanche to throw dishonest rhetoric at people he doesn’t like, though if he wants to do it on another site I’m not going to bother him about it.
Glad to read the LS crew is still ‘reading’ at the cave, Joan. It is a public forum and you are welcome to read and comment on any post you would like to. I recall we have had a few long discussions on this in the past and my position has not changed. I appreciate the patience of our host here that allows us to continue our debate on many issues that are not even related to the topic at hand.
Bill,
My opinion is that the people of Durham are not so bad as you make them out to be. Most are good, honest, caring people. It is not necessary to keep painting Durham as the cesspool of evil.
Mr. Dubose,
You got that from my posts? Who is the master of the BS now? It loses something in translation, that is certain.
I’m not sure that my comments on Chafe are b.s., but we can disagree, and that is why forums exist. (One thing I will not claim is that I write ex cathedra statements!) So, if I am wrong on Chafe, then I am wrong. I read his comments in a certain way, and given that he did sign the “We’re Listening” ad, which certainly made a bad situation worse, I am not going to give him much slack. He intervened into a case in a way that made it more likely that Nifong would see the green light to seek indictments.
(I have a number of emails from the Duke English faculty — including emails from dissenters, including one titled “Fools Rush In,” and it is clear from the exchanges that the people supporting the ad believed that the lacrosse players were guilty of rape. There really was no doubt in their minds at all, so I think we need to cut the b.s. that this ad was anything but a back-door rush to judgment on the lacrosse case.)
As for my comments about Durham, I would agree that the vast majority of people there — white and black (and Hispanic, as that community is growing) — are decent people who would make good neighbors. Yet, one could say the same thing about most of the people of Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. I grew up close to there during the Jim Crow years, and as long as one did not broach the subject of race, many of these were fine, upstanding people.
(It was as though they had compartmentalized that aspect of their lives. It was simply a way of life that few whites questioned and could not believe that they were wrong, as they were impervious to logic and even their own Bibles.)
Yet, many of these fine people of Durham turned into a lynch mob during those terrible months. They, too, were impervious to logic and any belief in rights and due process. The laws of science became laws of metaphysics, and people suddenly started to believe wild conspiracy theories like the DUMC personnel being able to sort out DNA by eyeballing a rape kit and things like that.
(If someone could do that, then that person would have to be nominated for a Nobel Prize in science or medicine! That would be an amazing accomplishment, something that is beyond the present realm and limits of scientific knowledge. Yet, lots of people were willing to believe it.)
So, the point is not that everyone in Durham is evil; rather, my point is that when views an event solely through the lens of race, or some other ideology, then truth often is left out of the picture.
Look, the circles of people with whom I run do the same thing. I have to watch out myself not to fall into such traps, and I know that I do. So, I cannot and will not put myself above the people of Durham; however, just as I would hope that people would try to restrain me from doing evil, I will try to do the same with others.
And what happened in Durham was evil. There is no other way to describe it. And there was no excuse for it.
****
I will add one more point as an example. Often, I argue with members of my church about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which I consider to be unwise and immoral. (I am against all aggressive wars and invasions of countries that are not officially at war with us. That view is set in stone.)
So, being that I go to a conservative, evangelical church, you can imagine that many people there do not agree with me. They also know that I have it in for prosecutors and the Drug War, and such a view contradicts the “James Dobson” view of the world that many of them share. (We share the same theology, but there are times when the application and worldviews that come from it will differ.)
To me, the Durham event is part of a larger context of police and prosecutorial abuse that is becoming more prevalent. When the courts are purely utilitarian, as they are now, then truth really does not matter, only results that fit into how one wishes the world to be. I started writing about the case from that point of view, but the more involved I became, the more I saw that the injustice was being pushed by groups that claim to be victimized themselves.
Thus, people whose very personal worldview is based upon their own victimization are not ever going to be able to see themselves as victimizing others. They tend to see the wealthy, white kids as being the ones who are victimizing everyone else, so to be able to see the lacrosse case in a context of real-live evidence and truth was next to impossible.
It’s great to go your own way in spite of the firmly held (and perhaps doctrinaire) opinions of everyone around you. The thing I’m confused about, though, is what you’re hoping to accomplish with some of your criticism. I don’t have any particular stake in Bill Chafe’s reputation, but still, I can’t help but wonder why it’s necessary to dwell on such a damning interpretation of his article—one that’s goes well beyond what’s in the text. It seems to play to the most vindictive or judgmental people on one side and alienate people like me on the other side.
I also need to add that I see Prof. Zimmerman as one of the good guys in this whole affair. Disagreements over what was said by William Chafe are peripheral. (In other words, I see myself quite capable of writing a lot of b.s. and have done so in my career.)
And, I also supposed that I would get alone quite will with Prof. Zimmerman and Mark in real life. I have good relationships with people whose worldviews are radically different than mine, and I mean radically different.
(For that matter, like Victoria Peterson, I am pro-life and anti-gun control. I suspect I would get along with her as long as we did not have to discuss certain subjects!)
So, I take the comments — and criticisms — in the spirit they are made. They are not personal attacks on me.
I appreciate this. I think it makes sense to be frank in this kind of debate, but it does tend to amplify the points of disagreement and not the common ground.
Mark, one opportunity our host offers us here is the chance, if we are honest, to better understand each other. He is requiring us to moderate our rhetoric, look carefully at what we say and claim, and self-examine. It is an annoying but valuable exercise. What can any of us ever achieve out of this case if we just keep yelling the same things at one another? He has nailed me on my comments a few times and I had to concede..yet I see the larger value..and I’m still here, far from my comfy base at the Gated Community…putting myself at the mercy of his considerable rhetorical analysis.
I still have a question for each of you…
[I divided it into two comments. -RZ]
TO OUR HOST…If KC is so far off the mark in his assessment of campus culture …how could so many Duke Professors, one by one..individually… decide to remain silent in the face of this legal outrage? There was no general guideline from administration to do so, right? It just does not make sense UNLESS…there existed some fear of some reprisal or negative payoff personally …for an affirmative involvement in defense of the Team. All these articulate people, whose very livelihood is discussing ideas…sit at Ground Zero in a case that is gripping the nation about STUDENTS AT THEIR SCHOOL …and have nothing to say? Only ONE side feels the freedom to articulate THEIR positions and indeed do so in a public way?
The silence is so big and deep..it must tell us something. I wish one of them would articulate..in PLAIN language..what? Was there truly such a large wave of apathy to Duke Students in the national spotlight? What then? If KC is so far off the mark?
Why later, did Davidson and others have to massage the circumstances in those early weeks to justify the Ad? The comment from Susan Thorne that she was obliged to sign otherwise “my voice won’t count for much in this world.” means WHAT? Why couldn’t Brodhead and Steel wait until the DNA came back to fire the Coach to cancel the season? Why did no Prof in the English department walk up to a reporter and say..” Um-m, McFayden’s in my class. That Email is a paraphrase from American Psycho.” Why wasn’t it “about the truth?” What WAS it about at Duke? In whose sense of values, does the Duke brand matter more than the three individual lifetimes of three young men?
What possible benign interpretation of those two sentences from Steel do you imagine? Literary reference again? Frank Sinatra song? What?
By the way, Professor, I do have an Email from Jason Trumpbour about those sentences. I will email you more info if you like.
So put this all together…can you see why to many of us..KC’s explanation makes the most sense? Of course, there was no organized “Gang of 88” but denying that provides no common sense explanation OF ALL THESE THINGS..TAKEN TOGETHER. On one hand you have the Listening letter, the negative op-eds, the LOE’s…on the other “The Big Sleep” of the Duke faculty. What it fear or apathy about their own students… that muzzled all these articulate, opinionated individuals …many of which are tenured and cannot have cared a flying fig about Steel’s agenda?
This is not about “Gotcha”…I would like some insight to understand. What explains why good people, caring people behaved individually and collectively this way? Off the reservation of academia, THAT is the question most folks I know ask to this day.
I do want to take a shot at this later, but right now I need to just clear these comments…
To Mark>>>>>you are someone I think has tried to be reasonable. I enjoy our debates as well. But there is an underlying anger toward these kids..even if I’ve overstated it at times…there’s something here that offends you about them…and it has always had me curious. I believe that is why you join a handful of others in mocking the families and deriding those who got involved to defend them. That is why you think sending pornographic PMs and posting obscene pictures directed to me..is my just due for involving myself. You explained this to me as “venting.” Yet you deplore the venting of the Lacrosse team in those notorious Emails. You condemn , on this blog and others, the “vileness” they display. Yet you do not condemn the “vileness” of what your 5 or 6 comrades at the Cave have sent to me and others, do you? To me, this sends a message that our support of these boys has been offensive to you in some way. That you cannot see your own double standard…underscores your anger.
What is it about?
If I were one of the Lacrosse Moms…how would you explain the role The Cave played in this case? (Again, not a “Gotcha.” But it serves some purpose to you or you would not participate.) After two years of participation..you know these folks well. You know their purpose.
The guys are innocent. There was no rape. The one racist remark that can be verified was said in reply to the “limp-dicked white boy” comment. The Email is the same kind of venting you condone for your friends ( supposed adults) at the Cave. So what still rankles you about the Team? PMs asking me to see pornographic pictures at the Cave do not convey any serious message to me.
I think “The Cave” represents part of the larger picture…anger toward these “types” of people that innocence cannot dispel. That is repellant to me, no matter whether Hooligan or Homeboy…no matter the Hue.
I don’t intend any of this as a “Gotcha,” I’m actually learning from some of our Host’s posts and retorts to me. (Did I just admit that?) At this stage, the more understanding between all parties, we have, perhaps the more the vitriol will tone down…and we can actually find some common ground. Maybe we can move forward.
So stop dodging, Mark..and help us better understand..both you and your chosen comrades at the Cave.
Why are you glad some at LS still read the sophmoric insults and obscenties at the Cave?
What do you hope we will learn there? What is the message?
What still drives the anger at the Team?
If Red Mountain says I have mis-characterized his points, I cheerfully accept any correction. Because this must mean that Red Mountain has actual argumens that he is ready to present instead of vague, hard to pin down inuendoes.
Is my assumption correct? Do you have in mind arguments that put Duke/Durham in a better light? Bye the way, simply saying “Lots of my friends still hate dukies” falls short of being an argument. So does saying, “I am not sure the whole story has been told.”
And Mark, just to make sure I understand your position and do not disseminate more “bullshit” here or elsewhere…it is your considered position that insults, profanity, obscenity and all manner of derision and defamation of the characters of real folks IN A PUBLIC FORUM is acceptable “venting”…but the venting by 19-20 year olds in PRIVATE emails you hold to a higher standard?
Would that be correct?
http://www.dukebasketballreport.com/articles/?p=22472
So, if not “statements of fact”… but “perceptions” in that ad… how much of the Listening statement was (to use your term) “bullshit.”
I think it was reasonable to expect that readers of the ad would understand the highlighted quotes as the opinions and feelings of angry and distraught students. I doesn’t seem like a big stretch to believe that’s what those professors were hearing from the students they were listening to. As I said in the post, I think they should have been listening to a wider range of students. I can imagine a version of that ad that included some of the same quotes and some from the other side—from lacrosse players and students who identified with them. It might have led to some much-needed understanding. That’s just utopian hindsight, but maybe it says something about the value of perceptions rather than facts. In more or less the same category is my feeling that it would have been great if the people objecting to the ad had made it a point to do better than the 88 and really listen to all Duke students. There’s more on all that in one of my old posts.
There’s a rather self-serving chronology slip in that editorial in the Duke Basketball Report. Writing about the listening statement, they say that “in our opinion contributed directly to things like the ‘Castrate’ placard.” The problem is that most of the protesting, including the protest they’re referring to, happened before the ad was published.
The formatting of that editorial is a bit confusing, but the quote in your comment is from Peter Sigal—we can’t blame everything on Bill Chafe.
May I take a swing at Chafe? Even though he inserts a line or two about waiting for actual guilt to be determined he writes his post in such a way that it would lose all point if they are actually innocent. That is very much a way of presuming they are guilty. Because if they did nothing harmful to Mangum, not even a bruise, and were no more ill-mannered than the strippers themselves, that the party was a boring non-event - then why rant about other bad cases and Southern Sexual History? What possible connection could there be if the party was an example of no sex crime committed? It could be assumed by his readers, therefore, that he was betting they actually were guilty of a sex crime Or maybe he was simply hyper-eager to pimp his larger agenda even if doing so hurt some members of the University Community.
I kind of agree. But it’s much easier now to form a realistic picture of what happened at the party than it was when Chafe wrote that editorial. It’s quite possible to consciously respect the need to presume innocence but at a gut level still react as if a violent crime occurred—one of many good reasons to be very careful what you write in the midst of collective outrage.
Thanks Joan,
I would appreciate you sharing any inside info you have on the context of Steel’s quote. As far as comparing comments discussing the case on various websites with that of the nature, context, and interpretation of the e-mail, I don’t see the comparison as a valid one. There have been many comments at LS that I would consider ‘vile’ as well but not in the same context as that of the e-mail.
I admire the bat-cave because it allows an open discussion of all opinions. There are some posters there that have been just as hard on Nifong and his minion as some others have on the players and lawyers. Some people enjoy a debate and discussion with folk that don’t always agree with them. I believe having opposing views argued and debated is a good thing and is an essential part of determining the truth.
I have been the subject of some not so nice attacks at Liestoppers. In the past, I was able to at least defend myself and my views directly. I have also been made fun of at the bat-cave and not all of my views and opinions are well received. My question to you is why limit yourself to a discussion with posters that 99% of the time are agreeing and cheering you on? The fact that you come here to debate some of this tells me you feel those limits and you want more than that. My main complaint with the bat-cave is that not enough of you guys come over there to make your case and debate the issues. My main complaint with Liestoppers is that they treat posters that agree with the party line better than those that do not. And those that are critical of certain preferred members or their posts are subject to possible exile.
These are just my opinions Joan, and are certainly subjective.
Let’s imagine for a minute that the charges had proven to be true. There were claims of expertise by certain quarters of Duke’s faculty in matters of race and gender. Was this knowledge apparent in their actions?
Statistically the victims of rape know their assailants (80—90%) and are of the same race (90%). Additionally white on black rapes are astonishingly rare. Those factors combined would have made an authentic Duke rape more than the exception to the rule. It would have been a freakishly rare statistical aberration. What would such an anomaly tell us about society?
The “experts” seemed to be suffering from either ignorance or innumeracy. I have no idea whether or not they were aware of these facts. I have also no idea if these facts would have impacted certain members of Duke’s faculty in the slightest.
As I said at the end of the post, I think those statistics are cause for skepticism but unlikely to be the source of much insight. I don’t feel like I’m in a position to judge the overall performance of any experts, but I would love to hear some candid reflection.
Mark, I posted:
“Is it your considered position that insults, profanity, obscenity and all manner of derision and defamation of the characters of real folks IN A PUBLIC FORUM is acceptable “venting”…but the venting by 19-20 year olds in PRIVATE emails you hold to a higher standard?”
You replied:
“As far as comparing comments discussing the case on various websites with that of the nature, context, and interpretation of the e-mail, I don’t see the comparison as a valid one. “
Gee, that’s profound. Could you explain with a bit of detail? Cite examples? Demonstrate your logic? You know..like..um-m-m..in a debate? Let’s try one last time…
I am asking you to compare a PM directing me to an obscene post about me on a public website with….. a private Email making an obscene paraphrase. Try to leave your Cave “tribalism” aside and treat this as an academic exercise.
What’s most interesting…is just THAT… the different standards YOU… Mark… apply to both. You do a fine job of affirming our host’s post on “tribalism.” You are loathe to ever criticize the antics of YOUR friends (that might take some courage on your part) but expect nineteen year olds to live to a higher standard. You excuse one behavior and condemn the other …and are so invested in your tribal bias…you cannot see your own hypocrisy. You seem to feel bad treatment of you on some Boards is an excuse to tolerate bad behavior in general. Well, those Lacrosse players thought they had been wronged too..but you only apply the free pass TO YOURSELF!
You participate on a Board that exists to make sport of people, of families who have faced an ordeal you all can hardly imagine. A Board that continues to smear these young men even after they have been declared innocent WITHOUT any evidence other than your own bias to support your position! You do this for no seeming good purpose, except eluding your own boredom. Or venting…. that your original presumptions proved wrong, I suppose. The dopey stuff you direct toward other posters(like myself) may provide some “amusement” and I can even give you a pass on that….but NOT what is directed at the families and the Team.
Why do you let that happen?
I asked you what the PURPOSE is of the CAVE. I will tell you the purpose of our Board: Liestoppers was formed to try to stop a “rogue” prosecutor, to help families who had few supporters. As you know, when two of the Defense Attorneys posted…they lauded our Board for the dissection of the case that the Hooligans provided every day. They continue to say we are a resource. That’s a positive purpose that shows value for the time spent. Do I approve of every word there…no. But considering we had almost 1500 members at one time..the Mods kept up as best they could. If I see something when I’m online, I say something AND report it. You have what…5 or 6 members?
Who are you helping with vicious comments about these folks and juvenile pranks? What’s the purpose of THAT KIND of free speech? How does it advance our understanding of this case or each other?
Your “free speech” line is great …as long as you are consistent and extend it beyond your friends.
Ryan’s Email was “free speech” too. How do you define the difference?
Ryan’s Email was PRIVATE. The smears on the Cave Board are meant for a public audience. Ryan intended his paraphrase for a small audience that understood his “joke.” You intend to do as much harm as the Internet allows with your comments about the boys and their families.
But here’s a prediction, Mark. You will NEVER address any tough question of mine. You will dodge and weave and say “No I don’t think so.” as if that should suffice. It doesn’t. It’s a waste of my time and our host’s bandwidth. You are not serious in trying to examine what happened here or how and why we all reacted as we did. Or the dynamic that drives the continuing anger at these kids at your Cave.
You are not interested in furthering our understanding of this case and each other. I think that our Host is trying to facilitate that kind of affirmative redirection of our long held presumptions of the “enemy.” To do that requires more introspection than your blow-off replies.
Well, you have your “team spirit.” You’re still wearing your “something happened” tee shirt cause it’s so comfy.
So I will ask you nothing more and answer nothing more from you.
Peace and harmony to you, Mark. I will not waste time with this “Talk Left” tap dance here on this blog.
‘a reader’ posted:
‘a reader’ -
Is it your considered position that when the owner of LS allowed repeated posts on the PUBLIC BLOG as well as on the LS PUBLIC FORUM stating as ‘fact’ that a REAL PERSON had committed the crime of hacking the LS forum, and then went on to allow members to post what s/he/they ‘believe’ to be the personal information — name, address, birth date, phone number, photos, etc. — of the person who has been declared guilty of the crime of hacking…is acceptable “venting”?
Correct me if I am wrong, but weren’t you one of the most vocal posters, publicly deriding those whom you say “rushed to judgment” in the Duke LAX matter?
Where’s you righteous indignation — here and now — when it is clear that your brethren “rushed to judgment” with their PUBLIC & REPEATED declarations that a REAL PERSON had committed a crime?
Do you know - FOR A FACT - that the crime of hacking even occurred? If so, please post the evidence for all to see. Otherwise, well, the claim smells an awful lot like a deliberate attempt to smear the reputation of an innocent person.
Joan, I don’t have a hard time separating a discussion of the e-mail from a discussion of the various discussion boards. I have tried to look at your accusations about my motives and way of thinking with some level of understanding while at the same time trying to overlook the many insults you throw my way. Instead of responding in kind, I will just say that you are wrong about me.
I am not the owner or moderator of the LS blog or Board. I know that people that I trust, who have never lied to me…. have told me what they ardently believe happened.
To me, my position is similar to those who knew the integrity of Pressler and the Team. I know the integrity of these folks. I have no reason to doubt their word over the word of others who have done little to demonstrate their credibility over the past many months as they’ve strained to maintain that “something happened.”
Is it so terribly important to be right? .
I also know that I received a PM from a banned IP just before the crash that linked to the Cave. I know I m a favorite target of yours…though I have had only one, fairly pleasant exchange with you, Immy. I can only think that my belief in the kids , my belief in their innocence to you…gave you “permission” to behave toward a stranger in any fashion you chose….That’s interesting, no? That’s part of the tribalism we are discussing here.
But I will ask you this: if you have been falsely accused, has it given you any empathy for the great sport and delight you have taken in the pain of others falsely accused? Has it moved you to use your own frustration to assess the hate and mockery you directed at these kids and families? Can you now step back and say…if it bothers me THIS MUCH to have my real name besmirched on an insignificant blog read by a small group of people…why did I want to continue to add to the pain of those besmirched in every form of media nationwide?
Why would you do that?
“Do you know - FOR A FACT - that the crime of (hacking) rape even occurred? If so, please post the evidence for all to see. Otherwise, well, the claim smells an awful lot like a deliberate attempt to smear the reputation of an innocent person.”
Did you ever ask this question of yourself? Did you discipline yourself by that standard?
I understand you assembled a very impressive library of facts about the case. That took talent and time. But why but equal time into just hours and hours spent mocking ….boys and their families you did not know? What is it about them you so despise so much? To me, that kind of free floating antipathy is as shameful whether directed at “homeboys” or “hooligans”
What if proof came out that the young men who are accused of murdering the Student President of UNC were INNOCENT? What would YOU think of people who formed a blog just to mock them and their families…because they don’t like “kids like that?”
Have you considered your OWN behavior in light of your own “righteous indignation?”
That’s the best I can do in answering your comment, Immy.I cannot comment further on the “crash” of LS because I understand the matter is far from over.
Mark, you are always polite. But our discussions go nowhere. That’s no insult. And I only question your motives in particpating in a Board that has no purpose but to defame and degrade kids and their families that most believed suffered much.
And I question your sincerity to discuss anything…when you don’t want to reach into yourself and your motives to answer.
As I see it, if a man swears to me that he’s no racist….yet chooses to support and belong to clubs that exclude by race… I have every right to factor THAT into my impression of him. Don’t you?
That you choose involve yourself in the rhetoric and antics of the Cave stands as a contributing fact about you… as does my participation in LS. We are defined in part by the company we keep. With all the causes to give our time to…the Cave is one of the ones you chose.
I would be interested in the real “WHY?” of that from you. As well as one from Immy. But I don’t see that happening. So I’m tired of the game of asking.
Well, IMMY, I find it curious to see that you are protesting that you are innocent of hacking the original Liestoppers board. Yet, you and your friends had absolutely no problem at all in helping to further false accusations of rape against three young men who never even touched Crystal Mangum.
So, please, spare me the protestations. If you really are that sensitive to false accusations, then perhaps you and your friends should stop accusing Reade Seligmann, David Evans, and Collin Finnerty of rape and other crimes.
a reader posted:
Has it ever occurred to you that people may fervently want to believe something (happened), yet they are mistaken in their beliefs?
Again I ask, have you seen the evidence which supports these publicly posted declarations that a REAL PERSON has committed the crime of hacking?
What is the expression, “doveryai, no proveryai”?
If you believe that I am ‘Immy’, well, that’s twice in one post that you would be mistaken in your beliefs. However, I’m not done counting.
To my knowledge, the only thing I have been falsely accused of, is being ‘Immy’.
Again, I am not Immy.
And yes, I also understand that the repeated, publicly posted declarations that a REAL PERSON committed the crime of hacking the LS forum is FAR from over. As a matter of fact, I understand that the REAL PERSON who has been repeatedly DEFAMED by the LIES posted on the LS blogspot & forum has several more months to decide whether or not to take legal action.
I’m pretty comfortable with the company I keep, but thanks for your concern. If you are interested in any “whys” as they pertain to Immy…well, you know where to find her and ask her yourself.
FYI, my comments are my comments. No one has requested nor encouraged me to comment here.
Believe it…
or not.
Bill Anderson wrote:
Perhaps you find it curious, because I am not Immy. And I have never accused Reade Seligman, David Evans or Collin Finnerty of rape or other crimes.
Perhaps you and joan should both take a few deep breaths before continuing your “rush to judgment” about me.
BeMused writes….”Has it ever occurred to you that people may fervently want to believe something (happened), yet they are mistaken in their beliefs?
How silly.
With one line, you undermine your entire post. Your sentence attempting to exonerate the behavior at the Cave because they were “fervent, yet mistaken” would also apply if, for discussion’s sake, posters at LS were “fervent but mistaken” about the hacking.
What “free pass” you now extend to one…you must extend to the other.
So, your “point” nullifies your reason for posting. You must ask YOUR question …TO YOURSELF.
Your second point seems to be….that you are not another Internet “personality” named IMHO?
Who YOU are is of no consequence. Like the non-racist member of a club that racially excludes….all we need to know about you is…you are part of a collective effort that has a long history of defaming innocent kids and their families.
I asked about empathy. If after over a year, of mocking and defaming three real young men and their families whose real faces and personal information were worldwide, if IMHO has any new perspectives on false accusation now that she “claims” to have suffered the same? There is never any attempt from you Bats to apply the same standard to YOURSELVES …ever. Your post reaffirms it.
We are not here, however, to talk about your Internet personality, or mine, IMHO’s or Bill’s. They don’t matter.
Liestoppers and the Cave do not matter.
We don’t matter.
Direct your posts, energy, and mind to what does matter.
We should be discussing issues larger than this juvenile prattle. We have to have a goal of better understanding the “tribal” positions this case excoriated. What happened here, what it says about our justice system, our racial interaction, campus culture, electing D.A.’s, media rush-to-judgment, false rape accusation…so many important issues. Not WHO you are. Your whole second post wastes bandwidth all about you.
Do you think our indulgent host or any of his readers care about “blog wars” or Internet personalities? Or if we know who YOU are? Or if LS was hacked or not hacked? If that is going to court, so be it.
WE are at THIS blog to discuss the issues of the Lacrosse case and all its larger implications. We have a host who has offered some excellently sourced and brilliantly argued new takes on the case. I come here because even when I disagree, I find what he writes fascinating. Let’s drop the team spirit and leave it for our home bases. Engage the issues.
One thing I have learned at this Blog is an awareness that often our “agendas” were as real as those we criticized in the 88. My concern has always been that we never lose sight of those to whom this was about ONLY THIS…their child. We must always keep their realness in front of us.
Getting back to the real issues, the real discussion must begin with me. My participation in “As the Blogs Turn” ends now
Joan said: “That you choose involve yourself in the rhetoric and antics of the Cave stands as a contributing fact about you… as does my participation in LS. We are defined in part by the company we keep. With all the causes to give our time to…the Cave is one of the ones you chose.
I would be interested in the real “WHY?” of that from you”
Asked and answered on many occasions Joan. You normally ask me this at the end of a discussion that you are not entirely satisfied with. You ask not because you are interested in my answer but rather to try and paint our previous discussions as disingenuous on my part. You frame your questions in a way that insults me Joan, and you never miss a chance to show me in a negative light. I still have tried to be polite and reasonable despite your tactics. I have been stupid, I suppose, because I didn’t realize you considered this a “game of asking”. That is the one truth I get from your post. You are not interested in the ‘WHY?’ and you do not want to believe my answer in any case. So be it.
a reader wrote:
And here I was wondering if you might have missed the double-entendre, Joan. Thanks for clearing that up for me!
a reader wrote:
If who “I” am is of no consequence, then why did you devote a 689 word post, addressing me repeatedly as “immy”? Nope. No tribalism present in that portion of your comment, Joan. (That’s me being facetious, Joan…in case you were confused. )
a reader wrote:
I don’t believe that I have ever defamed three real young men or their families, but thanks for accusing me. (There’s that pesky tribalism thing rearing it’s ugly head, Joan. Tsk. Tsk.)
As for imho…well, again, you’ll have to ask her your pressing questions yourself. You know where to find her.
a reader wrote:
Followed almost immediately with this gem:
Why yes Joan, why don’t we discuss tribalism and the fact that you certainly seem to be fond of lumping people into one “tribe” or another, even when you know NOTHING about an individual, other than guessing (and I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here) that their opinion differs from yours.
a reader wrote:
It’s always special when the thought police show up, directing people on what to do with their energy and their minds!
a reader wrote:
I don’t know if our indulgent host or his readers care about “blog wars” or internet personalities, but you just added another 502 words to his blog about both.
a reader wrote:
Well, I wasn’t going to go there, but since you brought it up…I’d have to say I think you’ve been stupid because as far as I can tell, ‘you’ have never once seemed to be able to distance yourself from YOUR “tribalism” and actually tried to digest — with some attempt at objectivity — what those whom may have a different opinion than yours, are actually saying. As far as I can tell, you have no interest in “listening” to what those varying opinions might be, because you already “know” all you need to know in order to dismiss what someone is trying to say — they’re not a member of YOUR tribe.
I apologize for this lengthy 697 word post…282 words of which were quoting Joan, of course. I am more than happy to donate to Mr. Zimmerman’s blog to help pay for any excessive bandwidth usage resulting from my 5 comments.
Given all the history behind this exchange, I’d be crazy to weigh in on one side or another. But since I’ve gone a number of rounds with Joan at this point, I have to say that I think that in our exchanges she has tried to digest my opinion.
Will Mark ever forgive Joan?
Will Baldo sue IMHO?
Will IMHO sue Tony Soprano?
Will Newport return from his captivity on Hitler’s yacht in time to testify?
Will these star-crossed blog personalities ever find true happiness?
To those breathless readers… hanging out there on the edge of your chair…I exhort you….don’t miss the next thrilling installment ….as the suspense ever builds on Professor Zimmerman’s increasingly hijacked blog.
My bullshit detector working again: A woman falsely claimed a black man robbed her and then, because he noticed a “McCain” sticker on her car, beat and mutilated her.
Here’s how my bullshit detector worked: First, I always have doubts about a story of a type that I’ve never known (not merely “heard”) to have happened before.
Here are the facts as the woman presented them:
Now she has confessed. I hope she’s charged with a false police report. I can think of some fitting punishments, but that’s because I’m so “politically-incorrect”.
Speaking of politically-incorrect, I never expected that I would report on this blog on a comment of mine that KC censored, but here it is:
KC has recently reported on the book by Crystal Mangum, employing the scathing style that we in the DiW commentariat have all come to love. As a comment to this blog entry, just to rib him, I wrote “Can’t we all get along?” and suggested that perhaps he and Crystal should get together to co-host a rally for Obama.
To my surprise, he refused to publish my little comment. He may have lost his sense of humor. Now that I think of it, I haven’t met many professors with the gift of self-deprecating irony.
RRH
This doesn’t strike me as a case that required any special knack for bullshit detecting. It seems like the kind of thing that any sensible person would reserve judgment on for a few news cycles, at least, especially in the middle of all the election craziness. It’s not the lack of a bs detector as much as the opposite—a desire to believe—that would lead people (like these) to buy this story right away. Though I guess the habit of carefully thinking through the specifics could balance out that desire.
As to the comment, I guess it might count as off-topic, but lots of off-topic humor gets through (and as I learned a while ago, some on-topic replies don’t get published). I don’t think he has much of a gift for irony even if it isn’t self-deprecating.
Regarding the Ashley Todd story, I was thinking back to my days as a newspaper editor — I was a section editor for the “National and International News Pages” (pages 2 and 3 of the daily, section B of the Sunday). Newspapers, as you may know, have daily “news budget” meetings where the editors and sometimes some of the top reporters get together and decide what stories will go into the next day’s edition. If it had been suggested to me to run with the first reports of the Ashley Todd story, I would’ve said that I believed the story would turn out to be a hoax and that we should, as you say, “wait a few news cycles”. As I recall my fellow journalists’ personalities, however, I think I would have been overruled. “It’s news!” Yeah, right it’s news; it is now.
I’m sorry to see that the potbangers at Liestoppers bought into the story, but maybe that’s one of the reasons I’ve never commented (and hardly ever visited) over there.