Cornell Rape Ethics Train Wreck

Now THIS Is a Progressive Double Standard…[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

[Update: Amid some skepticism that the image above is genuine, commenter Edward’s research (below in the comments) seems to confirm that the signs are indeed on the Cornell campus.]

It is pure harassment and an effort to create a hostile environment on the Cornell campus for male students, targeting a vulnerable group unethically. There are no indications so far that Cornell is taking down these signs, which students have begun putting up on campus, though the school is obligated to do so. The signs are obviously professionally manufactured, and not cheap.

It’s too easy to imagine equivalent signs denigrating women, blacks, Muslims, gays or other minorities currently the objects of progressive pandering, so I won’t. It shouldn’t be debatable that neither Cornell nor the political Left would tolerate any of those hypothetical messages. This sign also is defamatory, stating as fact that rapes have occurred on campus, leaving the implication that the students accused by Lucy Craig in her lawsuit were perpetrators.

How many of these signs are currently being displayed? One is enough, and one is too much.

Young men have joined American Jews as a group that can only justify voting for Democrats next month with a medical diagnosis of temporary insanity, or substantial brain damage.

The One Good Thing About The Cornell Rape Ethics Train Wreck…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

…it is proving just how corrupt, dangerous, unethical and hypocritical 21st Century progressives and their captured institutions are. Only to anyone paying attention, however. Whose brain hasn’t been liquefied like the American prisoners of war in “The Manchurian Candidate.

Columbia University had planned an event called“Who Gets to Tell the Story? Press Freedom & the Public Square,” to explore the challenges to Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech. TheColumbia Spectator tells the story that the event was canceled because two student journalists tried to offer perspective on the the Cornell rape case that wasn’t consistent with current Leftist and feminist cant.

You can’t make this stuff up.

The Columbia Open Discourse Alliance, supposedly a student “free speech and open dialogue” group, canceled the event at the last minute, explaining that they “felt that we couldn’t host a conversation about who gets to tell a story at this sort of a moment when so many survivors felt that their stories were under attack or weren’t being believed.”

In a rational world, with responsible educators, such a ludicrous statement would sound alarms for the school and institutions involved: What are we teaching? Why are our students so devoid of critical thinking skills? How do we fix this? Nah. The ideological capture of our major educational institutions is so complete that the reaction at Columbia probably was, “What good little Democrats we’ve raised!”

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Santa Rosa City (Cal.) Schools: Unethical, Illegal, Unconstitutional, Un-American—Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Cornell Rape Ethics Train Wreck just made a nasty stop.

The captain of the Piner High School football team posted the phrase “Free the Cornell Seven” on Instagram.

So what? That post is entirely, completely, protected free speech, and any semi-informed American dolt over the age of 18 should know it. That message does not involve the school or its students in any way. It is pure opinion.

Never mind. Santa Rosa City Schools officials announced last week that the student had been punished. So far, all we know about the punishment is that the player was barred from attending a team dinner. It doesn’t matter if the punishment was a reprimand in the principal’s office. A school can’t do that.

Not punished, however, were the approximately 200 students—nobody bothered to take names or count them— who walked out of class to protest the fact that their school hadn’t sufficiently punished a fellow student for making a statement of opinion that could not be legally, ethically or constitutionally punished. This is bonkers. The conduct of those students must be punished. Not only that, the teachers and administrators responsible for them not comprehending the essentials of free speech, the First Amendment and the Constitution at such an advanced age should be sacked.

The protesters demanded “accountability” for the football team captain. So did many parents, who complained to the school district that the message “makes light of sexual assault and should not be tolerated.” Not be tolerated? The school’s principal’s answer to the parents should have been,

“Mind your own damn business and get out of my face. You need to go back to high school yourself. You don’t know what you are talking about. First, anyone, including a student here, is free to post any opinion on a controversy in New York on his or her personal social media accounts any time they choose. We have to “tolerate it.” Second, there is no evidence that a sexual assault occurred, despite your fellow travelers on the Left seeking to wreck the lives of young men as a show of solidarity with the worst of American feminists.”

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

By all means, let us, as Barack Obama sagely advises, have more women in leadership positions.

I guess that loony scene doesn’t entirely speak for itself. I have questions.

Can anyone imagine men behaving like this? Can anyone imagine trustworthy, rational women behaving like this?

What, exactly, are they screaming about?

What good do they think screaming will do?

Who suggested that screaming was the ideal way to support Lucy Craig, aka. “Jane Doe,” who is accusing seven men of sexual assault that took place two years ago after texting one of her alleged assailants that everything was consensual and signing a document that stated that no rape occurred?

After whoever it was suggested this brilliant and articulate protest, what kind of woman would react with, “Perfect! That’s exactly what needs to be done in the interest of justice!”?

Is it possible that the women above think that more viewers will think, “Hey, they make a good point! I’m convinced Lucy was raped!” than will conclude, “Women in this country have completely lost their minds!”?

And again: this is the constituency voters will be siding with when they vote for Democrats next month.

Yikes.

Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

A few notes:

I was moved to visit a site purporting to feature a recent “major study” showing that Americans were getting dumber. As I started to read the report, I noticed that this piece was also on the home page: “Luck Is Everywhere For 3 Zodiac Signs All Week, From Now Until October 25.”

***

Speaking of “Is We Getting Dummer?,” AOC recently vomited out this: “Public colleges should be tuition free! They are attacking women’s ability to get an education! They don’t want women to go to college!” “They” are Republicans. Women outnumber men in colleges and law schools by a significant number, and men are being targeted for even existing in colleges. And this idiot is considered a power in the Democratic Party…

***

And speaking of those colleges, The Washington Examiner points out that by banning alll frat parties and events for the rest of the year, “Cornell is punishing all the other fraternities and students for the actions of a fraternity that does not exist and hasn’t existed for the entire time Cornell’s freshman and sophomore classes have been at the university”…”based on no evidence that a rape ever occurred, other than the female student’s claim, weeks after the encounter” [and] “is imposing collective punishment on its student population that does nothing to punish the alleged offenders, based on an alleged crime that still doesn’t appear to be a crime at all.” The Examiner adds, “Cornell is making reactive decisions based on social media posts and liberal media pressure, with no interest in any sort of institutional integrity.”

***

Well, I am officially nauseous.

Now you take over…

Once Again Your Host Wrestled His Fingers To The Floor…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Another cherished Facebook friend wrote a few days ago that it was the anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death (October 6) in Laramie, Wyoming. He was the young gay man who was beaten, tortured, and left to die tied to a split rail fence in 1998. Because gay activism was on the rise, a martyr was useful and the murder was lurid enough to attract eyeballs (“If it bleeds, it leads”), Shepard’s murder immediately was styled as a hate crime. After all, he was gay.

My friend wrote, in part, “We pray for the repose of his soul along with the souls of all those taken from us in prejudice.” But there is no evidence that Shepard’s murder was motivated by his homosexuality, other the fact that he was gay. As with the George Floyd debacle, the event was a gleaming example of presumed prejudice, fed by a powerful minority group that was pushing the “hate crime” concept hard. Eventually Barack Obama signed a federal hate crime law bearing Shepard’s name—of course he did, because that’s our O. But there is more evidence that Shepard’s death was the result of a drug deal gone wrong rather than anti-gay hate. Nevertheless, the story is still framed as a hate crime. Here’s NBC (gee, what a great news department!) stating as fact that Shepard’s death was motivated by homophobia.

My friend is gay, usually rational and always astute. It bothers me to see him spreading urban legends and bad history. But his heartfelt post got all sorts of “care” and “love” imogis, and I didn’t have the heart to spoil a public pandering.

Shepard died horribly, but so do lots of people, and that he’s remembered today because he happened to be a gay crime victim when so many genuine heroes are forgotten bugs me: you know how I am. There is not only a duty to remember but a duty to remember accurately, as well as a duty not to make people more ignorant than they already are.

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Somehow, A “Great Stupid” Rally At Harvard Doesn’t Seem So Incongruous Any More

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Don’t let poor, dumb Cornell take all of the justifiable ridicule and contempt when Harvard, the alleged creme-de-la-creme of the Ivies, has students behaving like this. From The Harvard Crimson:

More than 100 Harvard affiliates gathered in Harvard’s Zimmer Hall Plaza Thursday night to protest sexual violence, calling on the University to strengthen protections for survivors and reform its handling of harassment complaints. The rally was part of a nationwide day of action calling for justice for Jane Doe, a former Cornell University student, and Kendall D. Francis, a Louisiana State University student, who have both alleged sexual assault. Organizers at Harvard also issued six demands, including an independent grievance process for harassment and discrimination complaints, expanded resources for survivors, and the reopening of two diversity offices shuttered in July 2025…

“Jane Doe” is Lucy Craig, who has become one of the most improbable “Believe All Women” icons yet after suing seven male colleagues at Cornell for sexual assault despite massive evidence that she was a willing—well, you know. The only words that spring to mind are in bad taste. Women are disgracing themselves in this Ethics Train Wreck and apparently don’t care. My Leftist social media friends have decided that the Cornell 7 are rapists despite both the school and a district attorney determining that Craig’s claims are not credible; after all, she only sued after she was disinvited from a Halloween Party given by the same fraternity where she made whoopie, as Eddie Canter would say. But Lucy got her revenge: Cornell has cancelled that party and all others at fraternities for the rest of the school year. So there! New York’s woke Democratic governor Kathy Hochul appointed a special prosecutor who had already announced that she had decided the men were guilty despite her assignment of running an “independent” investigation. (Your host is quoted in this story about that...)

The LSU case? I don’t know anything about it, and I suspect the Harvard demonstrators don’t know much about it either, but someone figured out that Lucy’s tale is too thin to base a “nationwide day of action” on even in The Age of the Great Stupid (and before mid-terms).

How does a dubious rape claim at Cornell relate to the need for more “diversity” offices at Harvard? Why don’t these affiliated organizations also demand that the MLB divisional play-offs be expanded from five games to seven? Or that the official language of the U.S. be changed to Swedish?

The rest of the Crimson report is equally risible:

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As If We Need Any More, Here’s Another “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I wish our brave, adamant, progressive but mostly reasonable George Mason prof “jdkazoo” had not fled the commentariate. He maintained, against all evidence, that the mainstream media/corporate media/ Axis media was not biased, and, I think, believed this sincerely…because his skull had been hollowed out by living in the leftist echo chamber that is today’s academia. I would have loved to read his explanation for this. My guess is that he would have to default to what I always hear from Axis apologists: “Hey, it was just a mistake!”

The New York Times had seemingly decided to practice journalism by reviewing the text messages examined by Cornell in its Title XI investigation of “Jane Doe’s” (aka Lucy Craig) and reporting on them. It reported the key text, from Lucy/”Jane” to one of the rape-accuser’s original, consensual sex-partners, as concluding, “At the end of the day non of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly i really liked being w u and matt.”

But that is not how that text ended. The whole message reviewed by Cornell, CBS NY and the Times was this:

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Stunningly, a Fair and Perceptive Essay On The Cornell Gang Rape Ethics Train Wreck…In Slate! [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Knock me over with a feather. I once subscribed to Slate when it was an innovative commentary e-magazine genuinely striving to be independent and non-partisan. Then it went full woke and Trump Deranged, and managed to get on the EA blacklist. Frankly, I didn’t know it was still being published. But Hanna Stotland an independent educational consultant specializing in crisis management authoring her second Slate piece after seven years, delivered a superb analysis.

UPDATE: You can read the whole paywalled article at the archive link provided in the comments below by James Flood. [Thanks, James.] I was tempted to paste the whole thing into this post, but that would be unethical….

Some notable passages from the publicly available version deserve emphasis and should whet your curiosity:

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Update on the Tragic, Trump Derangement-Fueled Deterioration of the Once Ethical and Perceptive Ken White

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Why don’t “the guys” take personal responsibility????