The term suggested is “pro-crime” leftist. I’d prefer pro-chaos leftist, because the Far Left has always sown chaos as the perfect compost for expended government power and totalitarianism. Somehow, the Far Left is now just the Left. How unhinged (or sinister) are these people? Behold Anna Krauthammer, for whom indoctrination, mainstreamed bias from the new media and an IQ below freezing resulted in her authorship of “Why I Didn’t Report My Rape” at the Socialist/Communist rag “The Nation.”
She’s a “prison abolitionist,” as well as a Defund the Police lunatic and a “law enforcement is racist” puppet. Here’s enough of a sample of her nonsense to send you to the nearest toilet:
Pages: 1 2
Ethics Alarms 
“I’ve felt in my bones that I could never participate in any chain of events that might send someone to prison.”
Uh, sweetheart, is that a Freudian slip? Who participates in a rape other than the rapist? So, you’re saying it was a consensual gangbang with a bunch of guys you met in Vegas? Should the headline be, “Anything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas? Maybe the real reason you didn’t report the rape was that it wasn’t a rape? Are you trying to get major virtue signaling points out of a “chain of events” you’re ashamed of and trying to whitewash into something meritorious?
I’d bet good money on this. People have to come up with excuses to justify the worst decisions they make. In this case she wraps it into a “noble cause” of her religion – leftist ideology/defund/incarceration. Not only does she absolve herself of shame, she can feel good about it (sacrificing oneself for the betterment of the less fortunate!).
The human mind can’t take it otherwise. Nor will she escape the trauma no matter which way it really went unless she deals with it truthfully. It will manifest in some form until she does.
This is nice. An Irishman in Holland is running a wiki page to out ICE agents and provide their identities and personal information to anyone:
The sinister network of agitators unmasking ICE agents… and its chilling message to America | Daily Mail Online
“What’s wrong with these people?”
Tori Osterberg, 36, of Phoenix, holds a sign while openly carrying a shotgun during an interfaith vigil outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in downtown Phoenix
From the Arizona Republic’s article and photo gallery reporting on a demonstration outside an ICE office in Phoenix. Would a right winger guy get away with doing something like that?
Oh, I was wrong. It wasn’t a protest, it was an interfaith vigil.
Moron though Krauthammer certainly is, we won’t stop the morons from winning if we don’t get curious as to how they see things.
Does she think that rape is something an otherwise decent person can do in a moment of weakness, like shoplifting or joyriding?
Under what circumstances would she consider an offender to have ruined their own life, and her reporting them to be a natural consequence of their actions? Would she report a murderer?
Did she fail to report the rapists for another reason that she’s subconsciously ashamed of and rationalize it to herself after the fact?
What does she think should be done about rapists, if not imprisoning them for the safety of others?
On a related note, how exactly does she expect a society to function with no police or prisons? (These are the sorts of empty ideals that the Left tends to have more of than the Right, simply because the Left tends to want change more than the Right. Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement.) In the history of humanity, there have been (and still are) small communities with no formal law enforcement or incarceration. I think at some point they banish dangerous members or just kill them.
These are some of the questions we should be asking.
“Moron though Krauthammer certainly is, we won’t stop the morons from winning if we don’t get curious as to how they see things.”
I bet that her story is a lie. If so then there is a psychological element and a pathology involved which is not amenable to rational, ethical analysis. Her story is absurd. If she had a child who was harmed or abused would she not be sure that action were taken? What about a perverted teacher with numerous children?
Her mind is deranged.
I similarly propose that there is a deep current of “derangements” among many on the modern Left-Progressive vanguard. What they do, their ideology, is NOT that of traditional leftism. It is bizarre and often psycho-sexual. “Queer theory” and “queering“ of social mores is a big part. The “rebellion” against normalcy is a big part of their opposition.
I realize that it is speculative to theorize about the psychology of other people since it involves assessments that consider sexual derangement as spiritually pathological, yet I do not think the connection can be dismissed. There are currents of psychology operating in the wide culture that are hard to assess.
I find a lot to agree with here.
“I find a lot to agree with here.”
Second!
PWS
A quote from above: I don’t want to ruin the lives of my rapists and I don’t know if they have children.
My question for her is, do you think the rapists worried about ruining your life? Did they care anything about you? Shouldn’t rapists have to account for their actions? Don’t you care that they might do this to someone else?
Also, why should them having children matter at all? Maybe they have children, but shouldn’t they be better parents? This rationale is one of the least sensible things that I’ve heard from someone who is older than 10 or 11.
The enforcement of criminal laws is only one of several aspects that the left has rejected in their woke insanity.
We have reliable electricity, clean water supply and waste removal to everyone’s home. It vastly improves everyone’s life. We avoid great amounts of disease because of this. Yet they’re willing to sacrifice it at the alter of global warming. Global warming does case deaths. But so does abandoning reliable power. Power outages kill. Stop lights turn off. Food spoils. Heat or cold kill. Contaminated water and spilled human waste kill. One would think that people wouldn’t put up with a shift towards unreliable power. But one would think that people wouldn’t willingly tolerate the crime in cities either, would you.
We also see this when attacking “toxic masculinity” and males in general. That toxic masculinity applied by society puts out fires, lessens crime, keeps the lights on and does all the other physical things that keeps society functioning. Women think they don’t need men, but rely non-stop on all the things men bring them.
I honestly think much of this is a religion to the left. I see parallels with them and religious practices of primitive societies. Anna needs to be “punished” for her sins, much in the way primitive cultures make human sacrifices to appease god. Wokism is the left’s god, and when they punish themselves, it makes them feel better in the same way a sacrifice does for simple society.
Jack,
“Ah! You’re a moron, then! Good to know. By the way, she DID participate in a chain of events that should send someone to prison: she was a participant (or victim) in a rape.”
Disugusting. I find it difficult to fathom how anyone with functioning ethics alarms could write such callous crap. Before even acknowledging this person as victim to an unsconscionable assault (and how such a trauma might have afftected their point of view), you jump right into judgement over her emotional response. I read the piece less as advocating a political position and more as someone describing how their thinking has evolved following personal tragedy.
Moreover, she’s not a “moron” for holding beliefs, even those based on bad information or poor reasoning. After all, most folks’ opinions function seperately from simple judgements of right and wrong — they’re simply someone’s point of view. Yet, you so often chose to view differences in outlook as a failing of intellectual curiousity, when (in reality) it simply reflects different lived experience. Would you have said the same to Krauthammer herself )(you did say “you”)? For instead of displaying any sort of interest in swaying hearts and minds, you resort to more mud-slinging, becoming just as filthy in the process.
“Why is any magazine giving a platform to someone whose heartfelt opinion makes as much sense as someone who believes that insects are crawling around under her skin?”
Perhaps because rape ius one of the most fundamental betrays of societal trust and bodily autonomy? Because such a violation can make a person feel as though even their own body is no longer safe or “home”. Frankly,despite your frequent talk of ethics and morality, you so often address people (including me) in a manner that seems lacking in both. Then again, I must have forgotten about your vast personal experience with the subject that allows you to so easily cast stones.
The woman is NOT a moron for holding to the belief that victims of violent crime – including a violent violation of her own body – should receive no punishment. The woman IS a moron for committing her beliefs to the eternity of print and publication.
Whether or not her rape is real – and I have no reason to believe it’s not – her words are a slap in the face…no…a punch in the gut to myriads of women who endured similar trauma and must now live their lives with the resulting scars – mental, physical, and spiritual.
And what about other potential women those men may have assaulted after raping Ms. Krauthammer? Her reporting the crime may have prevented those. Ms. Krauthammer’s words are disgusting, showing a callous disregard for other women dealing with a deeply personal atrocity, while simultaneously showing a complete lack of interest in protecting them.
Again, people also have the right to remain silent…they should use it often.
Oops, I did it again…the first sentence should read:
“The woman is NOT a moron for holding to the belief that those who commit violent crime…”
I started typing with one thought, finished the response differently, and didn’t fix my intro. Careful reading before posting can be my friend.
Not a technical, literal moron, perhaps: she may have an IQ above 80. But adamant belief in a principle that doesn’t exit in law, logic or the real world is moronic. She apparently believes in several such principles. Why you would find it “disgusting” and unethical to strongly condemn badly reasoned radical ideas that we know…KNOW…will cause nothing but damage and disaster if they catch on or spread is a mystery to me. Look where open borders advocates have brought us. The sooner such irrational, utopian delusions are discredited and crushed the better for all. I could list about 20 off the top of my head. A lot of them are on lawn signs in my neighborhood.
And to be a little bit more harsh, because this comment deserves it, the issue isn’t rape, so your “you have no standing to talk about a rape victim” crap (and it is crap, and not just because I DO have standing) is a silly straw man. The issue is crime, law, and civilization. The ethics issue is no different whether the issue is rape, assault, theft, murder, or treason.
From her article:
Even though what happened to me was so extreme, brutal, and unambiguous that it would meet any legal standard for rape, I still sometimes find myself thinking of everything that I did wrong. It is easy for me to come up with examples. I consider the tone of my voice that night when I first started speaking to those men as we lingered around the windowless casino floor, or my demeanor and what it might have signified to them; I direct my interior monologues against some imaginary jury. I know in my heart that none of this is the cause of what they did, although I slip into these thoughts at lower points. And yet I don’t think my tendency for these kinds of monologues is simply a product of my own self-blame. When I think about rape the way that the law does, it is inevitably punishing. Despite the law’s promise to punish the criminal, it only realizes that punishment through the ruthless interrogation of victims—legal justice’s necessary cruelties.
How did she get from the casino floor — a public area — to a hotel room where she says she was raped by 6 men? It does not hold together. And if she invited them — how else did they get to her room? — the accusation of “rape” is made implausible.
Neil Did you examine the timeline here. There was no evolution of thought after the fact. By her own admission, she held the belief beforehand because she states that was the reason she did not report it.
“The simple answer to the question of why I never reported the rape is that I believe in the abolition of police and prisons. I don’t want to ruin the lives of my rapists and I don’t know if they have children.”
Another point to mention is who are the two friends with whom she was traveling. Were they the rapists? She does not say who they were or why they were unavailable during the rape. Most women I know when traveling double and triple up on hotel rooms.
I think it is fair to say that her ideas can be considered bonkers. Imagine a world in which there are no societal imposed consequences on behavior. One does not need a high degree of intellectual curiosity to see the dangers in such a state. Keep in mind she wrote the piece in a magazine to espouse a particular political point of view. Reader critique in this can can be harsh or mild. Jack took a harsher approach at criticism yet you argue that he is a bad person because he failed to take into consideration her lived experience yet you negated his outright.
Finally, funny thing about traumatic experiences people don’t like to talk about them let alone become a polemicist. Why should we believe a rape ever occurred given her desire to publicize the claimed event but unwilling to report it at the time? The answer to why the magazine would publish this “heartfelt opinion” is because it fits with its desire to create division. I doubt seriously if the magazine considered the source as a true one.
“I think it is fair to say that her ideas can be considered bonkers.”
Masterfully understated…
PWS
My wife and I discussed this article extensively last night, struggling to grasp what we were really dealing with. The author claims she was raped by six men while traveling with two friends. Allegedly this event happened in June of 2021, just after Las Vegas lifted its social distancing restrictions. The six men followed her to her room and then proceeded to rape her all night long. The two friends either were likewise raped at the same time, or they were mysteriously absent and did not notice anything about their friends’ state the next morning. And from our understanding of what typically happens in such a gang rape situation, there’s no way they could not have noticed.
Rape is violent, especially if the victim resists, but even if she does not. It is violent in part because men engaging in such acts typically seek to denigrate the woman, inflicting bodily harm on her as part of the process. This has been exacerbated in recent years by the changing types of male fantasies, as indicated by searches in pornography. I have listened to speakers on the topic mention that increasingly the most popular searches by men have involved much more BDSM and incredibly denigrating acts women were forced to perform or were inflicted on them. This has spilled over into consensual sexual encounters, where men insist their female sexual partners engage in increasingly subservient, inflicted roles. When it comes to gang rapes, a woman is considered lucky to survive, because the violence inflicted on her by multiple men for so long is so extreme.
I don’t want to minimize what happened if this women truly did endure such a situation. Different people handle (or don’t) trauma in very different ways. However, my wife and I both felt something off in the author’s very tedious article. We felt this sounded too much like someone who has access to all the tropes of what rape victims experience, but did not really experience it herself. Given her anti-prison, anti-police stance, it was hard to swallow that she truly was a victim, and not someone claiming victim status in order to build credibility. Yes, many rape victims never come forward, and part of that is because they don’t want to endure the suspicion and the scrutiny. Some never come forward because the rapist was a family member, or a friend of the family, and they don’t want to tear the family apart. The author addresses both of these in her essay as additional reasons for why she won’t report this rape. Except… By making a public article like this, anyone with some sleuthing skills could probably find evidence of Krauthamer in Las Vegas at a certain date, staying at a certain hotel, and probably find a reasonable set of suspects for the crime. It might go no further than that, given Krauthamer would likely refuse to press charges. But it is an odd way to go about not reporting a rape, by publishing an essay in a national forum to discuss why one is not reporting the rape.
If she truly endured what she claims, and she is willing to stick to her guns on abolishing police and prisons, then my hat is off to her. As nuts as her stance is, it take real dedication to maintain such a position when life gave her ample reason to change her mind.
As nuts as her stance is, it take real dedication to maintain such a position when life gave her ample reason to change her mind.
I don’t know what to make of this statement. It would also apply to someone who adamantly believes that, say, blacks are a lower species and not deserving of human rights.
I’m willing to admire the dedication to an ideal, apart from what the ideal really is. I’d admire the dedication of a communist who watched all his property confiscated and his family sent off to the gulags who nevertheless held that communism is truly how government and economics should work. I’d still think he was crazy and flat out wrong, but I’d admire the dedication. One of the biggest accusations against leftists in particular is that their ideas don’t really survive an encounter with reality. A person is a socialist until he starts earning a paycheck and sees how much is taken in taxes, for example. So it would be, if it truly happened, quite a feat to maintain that police and prisons should be abolished when one suffered a horrendous crime.
Note that I say ideals. Just believing that blacks are a lower species is not really an ideal, and clinging to a mere notion regardless of evidence is not necessarily worthy of any respect.
But Ryan: all historical and cultural evidence indicates that a crime that is not appropriately punished becomes a norm.
I fail to see how this contradicts what Ryan said in any way.
He’s saying, and I agree, that if someone believes that a certain policy would make society better off, and they maintain that belief even when it turns out to be painful for them personally, that is a sign of integrity. It may be incredibly foolish for them not to take that pain as evidence that the policy isn’t actually good for society, but we do know that many otherwise good policies have downsides for some people, right?
A Second Amendment supporter whose child was killed with a gun and who still supports the right to bear arms displays the same integrity, regardless of whether or not you believe their position is foolish.
Then again, it’s also possible that their inner narrative is trying to portray the death as meaningful, an event that happens sometimes as part of the price of self-defense. That might be less painful for them than believing it was completely preventable with “common sense” gun laws. I’m not commenting here on the Second Amendment either way; I’m making a point about how we should consider and question the various motivations people might have for holding to or changing their beliefs, rather than relying on our assumptions about them.
So serila killer have “integrity”? Even if that’s accurate, it isn’t praiseworthy.
I’m not following how you got there. I’m saying that if someone believes (foolishly or otherwise) that a policy is good for society, even if it’s inconvenient to them personally, that’s showing they’re willing to put society’s good ahead of their own personal comfort. That shows a good character in the form of integrity. That’s something I want to encourage. They’re not committing the original position fallacy, where a person subscribes to a particular model of an ideal society because they assume they would be in a high-status position in that society, and when the tables turn they realize they don’t think it’s such a good idea after all. Integrity is not quite the same thing as good sense, although the two qualities may seek each other out.
One can also measure strength of character by how much of a person’s individual desires they are willing to give up in order to accomplish what is most important to them. Sometimes that important goal is achieving a “better” society, whatever that means. It would be nice if such people also a) cared about the wellbeing of others, and b) foresaw the consequences of their actions and the helpful options available to them.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make by introducing serial killers into the conversation.
Serial killers believe, for example, that prostitutes are blights on society and must be eliminated. That is no more a bomkers idea than “rapists deserve kindness and mercy, so we shouldn’t imprison them.” You say “that’s showing they’re willing to put society’s good ahead of their own personal comfort. That shows a good character in the form of integrity.” This is where absolutism is a necessary part of the calculation. No, someone who advocates objectively harmful acts or policies that harm others cannot be regarded or treated or defined as ethical. Again, you’re slipping into relativism.
I was not aware that most serial killers believed that prostitutes must be eliminated; I was aware that some professed to believe that. I figured it was either a pretense or a subconscious rationalization for their actions. I imagine some serial killers have different pretenses/rationalizations, or perhaps none at all, if they just don’t care.
You’re being very generous in assuming that everyone sees what is objectively harmful just as clearly as you do.
I can commend the power of a person’s engine just fine while condemning their inability to steer in the right direction.
If you’re trying to point out that fanatics can be self-sacrificing and aren’t very admirable, I’d say that’s a good point and it will cause me to reconsider how I’m defining admirable characteristics.
The difference isn’t that fanatics are wrong, though. It’s that they don’t conceive of the possibility that they’re wrong, or that they have a choice in what they give up. A fanatic who believes something I happen to agree with is no more admirable to me than one who believes something I disagree with.
Not all serial killers, but a vast number of them. I’m being very generous in assuming that everyone sees that nurdering woman is objectively harmful just as clearly as I do? That’s troubling.
Not murder specifically, but there are a lot of policies that you consider obviously objectively harmful that other people don’t realize are bad ideas. I wonder if, for instance, you think that people who believe in tighter gun control laws are completely unethical just because they came to a different conclusion than you do on what makes society safe, even though both of you intend for people to be reasonably safe.
I do agree that ethics has aspects of both intention and competence, such that well-intentioned people can do unethical things because they haven’t given intelligent thought to the consequences of their actions. However, I believe on some policy disagreements, while there may be an objectively best answer, it’s not obvious enough to label anyone who pushes for a different answer as “unethical” and uninterested in the good of society.
Some things, like murder, are obviously evil enough that anyone who supports them is using deeply flawed reasoning (if they’re reasoning at all) and they may need help escaping that thinking, or we need to keep an eye on them so they don’t cause any problems.
Jack,
No argument there. There are many reasons that anti-police, anti-prison idealism is just flat out wrong. The normalization of crime is certainly chief among those reasons. I would also add that people who commit crimes don’t just hurt their victims, don’t just hurt society at large, but also hurt themselves, and punishment for their crimes, which includes the potential of incarceration, is actually part of the restorative process of the justice system.
My (potential) admiration for Krauthamer is kind of like the meme, “May your wife look at you the way Leftists look at drug-dealing wife-abusers.” The point isn’t that drug dealing or wife abuse is okay, but that the (alleged) level of admiration the Left seems to have for said dealer/abuser is of such a height that that level of affection is appropriate for spouses. In a similar way, the level of dedication Krauthamer is showing for her anti-prison, anti-police position is the level of dedication people should have to legitimately good ideals, even when upholding those ideals gets tough. I suppose a good example of this would be “Taking the high road.” After watching people of opposing political viewpoints take the low road often enough, we become tempted to abandon the high road, using all kinds of rationalizations like, “If we don’t hit them back twice as hard with these dirty tactics, they’ll never learn.” I would like the high-road idealists to have the level of dedication to that ideal that Krauthamer seems to have with her abolitionist ideal.
First I have to make the disclaimer that am not a psychiatrist.
There is a phenomenon called Stockholm syndrome, which may be at play here.
There is also the phenomenon that a number of women have taboo fantasies such as rape fantasies, and other fantasies in which women are not in control of their sexuality. The book and film “Fifty Shades of Grey” was hugely popular among women. I am suggesting here that she secretly enjoyed being raped….however her reaction may be a coping mechanism, and an adaptive one from an evolutionary perspective. In deep human history wars between tribes often resulted in the extermination of the males and elderly, while the nubile females were given to the warriors as war brides. Being able to cope with rape, and being able to settle into a forced marriage with a warrior who just help kill your husband and brothers may be adaptive. This phenomenon may also explain why women are better able to adapt to a divorce or death of spouse than the husband.
There are plenty of resources out there at YouTube, I linked a random video about the topic.