All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/
News

How often are accusations of rape or sexual assault false?

23 Comments
Zerlina Maxwell "automatically believe rape claims"
Should we “automatically believe rape claims” like Jackie’s UVA rape claim?

The purpose of this post is to make the case that claims of rape and sexual assault should be made to the police, investigated by the police, and then proceed to trial. We should not punish men for charges that are made outside of the criminal justice system. Let’s take a look at some previous cases and studies to see why not.

Here’s one reported by the far-left Newsweek:

Rolling Stone‘s disastrous and discredited campus rape story now has a price tag.

The magazine has settled a defamation lawsuit filed by the University of Virginia fraternity at the center of the 2014 blockbuster feature by Sabrina Erdely, which was retracted after key details in the story were called into question. According to reports, Rolling Stone will pay a settlement amounting to $1.65 million.

The article, which was published in late fall 2014, described an alleged brutal gang rape of a student named “Jackie” at a UVA fraternity. The story drew wide attention and triggered a police investigation, but it was officially retracted in April 2015 after Jackie’s claims were called into question.

Why did she lie?

The Washington Examiner reports:

Documents have shown that Jackie likely made up the gang rape to try and win the affection of fellow student Ryan Duffin. She had tried other lies to get his sympathy, including pretending to have a terminal illness. When that didn’t work, she tried to make him jealous by inventing an attractive man who would constantly say she had a crush on someone else and he didn’t understand why.

When that didn’t work, she went on a fake date with the fake man, and then claimed she had been gang raped. That didn’t win his affection either, and the two eventually stopped talking.

She lied, because she wanted to get affection and sympathy from a boy she liked.

Here’s another featuring a student at Hofstra University, reported by the NY Post:

The Hofstra freshman who had a raunchy restroom romp and then cried rape made up the twisted tale because she didn’t want her schoolmates — particularly her new boyfriend — to think she was easy, the beau told The Post yesterday.

“I think she needs a psychologist. She probably felt like, ‘They’ll think I’m a slut,’ ” her boyfriend, who asked not to be identified, told The Post.

Danmell Ndonye, 18, who had accused five men of gang rape, admitted the truth only when prosecutors confronted her after learning of a cellphone video that captured the whole sordid episode and showed she had willingly participated, officials said.

She lied because she didn’t want her boyfriend (and others) to think that she was a slut.

Although she made a false rape accusation, she never received any jail time. In fact, she was never even charged.

Another, reported by the Associated Press:

Nikki Yovino, 20, of South Setauket, New York, was sentenced Thursday in Bridgeport Superior Court. She agreed to serve the jail time when she pleaded guilty in June, just before jury selection was to begin, to misdemeanor charges of falsely reporting an incident and interfering with police.

Yovino was attending Sacred Heart University in Fairfield when she reported being raped by two school football players at an off-campus party in Bridgeport in October 2016. But police said she later admitted making up the allegations so she wouldn’t ruin a relationship with another student.

[…]Both players remained unidentified until Thursday, when Malik St. Hilaire came forward to speak at the sentencing and confront Yovino. The Connecticut Post reported Yovino rolled her eyes and smirked as St. Hilaire talked about how the allegations affected his life.

She lied, because she didn’t want to ruin a relationship with her boyfriend. And of course there are cases where the woman just wants to get revenge on men for sex she consented to, but that later made her feel bad, as in the Duke University lacrosse case. False accusations of rape or sexual assault are used by people to get attention and sympathy, or to get an alibi when they’ve done something wrong, etc.

Clearly, there are cases where people lie about rape and sexual assault. That’s why we need to get the police involved, and not punish anyone except in the ordinary way that laws and courts punish. Let’s take a look at some studies to see how often false charges are made.

What do the studies show?

A Fox News article from a prominent equity feminist, Wendy McElroy cites several studies, here’s one:

[…][The] study conducted by Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University… examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987.

Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”

[…][E]ven a skeptic like me must credit a DNA exclusion rate of 20 percent that remained constant over several years when conducted by FBI labs. This is especially true when 20 percent more were found to be questionable.

False accusations are not rare. They are common.

So, there’s only a 41 percent conviction rate. DNA testing exonerates 20% of men, and makes the guilt another 20% of men “questionable”. A total of 59 percent of cases didn’t result in a conviction.

In false rape cases, men can spend years in jail, until the women finally admits she made the whole thing up. There are campus cases where only the accused’s witnesses are consulted, only evidence confirming guilt is considered, the charges and evidence are hidden from the accused, the accused is denied legal representation, the accused is denied cross-examined of the accuser, etc.

A double standard

So, that’s how men accused of sexual assault and rape are treated, but what about women?

Consider this case where a female teacher got zero jail time for sexually assaulting an underage male student.  Or this case from the UK where a married mother of two was convicted of producing child pornography, but also received no jail time. It’s not just that men are being denied due process when they are accused of something. It’s that women ARE NOT being punished when they ARE found guilty of something. There just seems to be a widespread view that women are never responsible for their bad choices, and that men are always to blame for everything. What are women learning from this about how they should treat men in their own lives? Should we expect men to have friendships with women and pursue relationships with women in this cultural climate?

News

Antifa Democrat cites AOC’s “concentration camp” rhetoric in domestic terrorism manifesto

4 Comments
ICE detention centers are literally mass murdering US citizens
ICE detention centers are literally mass murdering US citizens

I remember when a Bernie bro who worked for Bernie Sanders’ campaign took a gun and shot at Republican legislators who were just playing baseball. It seems like domestic terrorism attacks are being committed by Democrats more and more. Just this past week, one of their Democrat brown shirt fascists committed more violence, and even cited AOC’s rhetoric in his “manifesto”.

Here’s the latest domestic terrorism committed by Democrats, reported by the Daily Wire:

According to a local report, a man that authorities say attacked an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Tacoma, Washington over the weekend repeatedly used the same “concentration camp” rhetoric which socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) injected into U.S. politics last month, in a manifesto that he allegedly wrote.

The attacker, whom The Daily Wire is not naming, identified himself as part of the far-left extremist group Antifa in the document, according to CBS-affiliate KIRO-7. The attacker “was armed with a rifle and incendiary devices that he was tossing at the Northwest Detention Center early Saturday morning.”

KIRO-7 adds: “Friends say he did make a statement in this manifesto he sent to them Friday night. In it he says, ‘i regret that i will miss the rest of the revolution,’ he wrote, ‘doing what i can to help defend my precious and wondrous people is an experience too rich to describe. i am antifa.'”

KIRO-7’s report included a link to the manifesto, where the attacker used the term “concentration camps” four times and referred to them as being “corporate for profit.”

Ocasio-Cortez injected the rhetoric into the national political discussion last month after she made the dubious claim during an Instagram live video.

What did AOC think about this domestic terrorist?

AOC: If you detain illegal immigrants, you're Hitler
AOC: If you support the detention of illegal immigrants, then you’re Hitler

The Daily Wire reports on her reaction to the terrorist attack:

After an attempted terror attack by a self-identified far-left Antifa member against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Tacoma, Washington on Saturday, a reporter from Rebel Media asked freshmen Democrats if they would condemn the attack, Antifa violence, and violence in general. Unsurprisingly, “fresh face” lawmakers, namely Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), refused to utter such a simple condemnation.

Omar, amazingly, apparently thought the questioning was funny, laughing when she was asked about the far-left violence.

“Will you condemn Antifa?” the Rebel’s Keean Bexte asked Ocasio-Cortez and Omar. “Do you feel like you have any sort of responsibility for their actions?”

[…]Omar, stone-faced, again refused to answer.

“Do you feel like you bear any responsibility for what happened?” the reporter continued. “Ms. Cortez, do you feel responsible at all?”

Directing his attention to both representatives, Bexte against asked: “Will you tell Americans not to be violent anymore?”

This is when Rep. Omar, holding her Starbucks drink, is seen and heard laughing on video.

It’s not just AOC who is apparently inspiring domestic terrorists. Consider this story from the Washington Free Beacon:

Democratic freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) has been holding a series of secret fundraisers with groups that have been tied to the support of terrorism, appearances that have been closed to the press and hidden from public view.

The content of these speeches, given to predominately Muslim audiences, remains unknown, prompting some of Omar’s critics to express concern about the type of rhetoric she is using before these paying audiences, particularly in light of the lawmaker’s repeated use of anti-Semitic tropes in public.

Omar recently spoke in Florida at a private event hosted by Islamic Relief, a charity organization long said to have deep ties to groups that advocate terrorism against Israel. Over the weekend, she will appear at another private event in California that is hosted by CAIR-CA PAC, a political action committee affiliated with the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR a group that was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a massive terror-funding incident.

Omar’s appearance at these closed-door forums is raising eyebrows in the pro-Israel world due to her repeated and unapologetic public use of anti-Semitic stereotypes accusing Jewish people of controlling foreign policy and politics. With Omar’s popularity skyrocketing on the anti-Israel left, it appears her rhetoric is translating into fundraising prowess.

So here you have socialists who hate Jews. Where have I seen a political party that championed socialism and anti-Semitism before? Oh yes, in 1930s Germany. And those German socialists also used violence and vandalism to press their socialist anti-Semitic agenda.

I’m concerned, because I think that socialists like AOC and Omar and Tlaib represent the future of the Democrat party. They’re wildly popular with young Democrats. Young Democrats agree with them on eliminating private health insurance, eliminating gasoline-powered cars, capitulating to radical terrorists in the Middle East, persecuting Christians who dissent from the LGBT agenda, and subsidizing infanticide with taxpayer dollars. I think this violence-inducing rhetoric is the future of the Democrat party. There is no tolerance for American ideals on the secular left.

News

Is the Big Bang cosmology a theistic or atheistic theory of cosmic origins?

6 Comments
Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

Dr. Michael Strauss is a practicing particle physics employed as a professor at University of Oklahoma. He does research in particle physics at CERN, a large hadron collider. It’s safe to assume that he knows something about experimental physics.

Here’s what he writes about Christians and the Big Bang at his new blog:

When my children were young, I would often drive to the home of the person babysitting my kids, usually a young teenage girl, pick her up, then drive her back to my house.  In the car I would ask questions about her interests or her school.  In addition, I would sometimes ask a question that intrigued me since I am a scientist and a Christian, “Do you think the Big Bang is a theistic theory or an atheistic theory?”  Now that question is not on most people’s list of babysitter interview questions, but I was interested to know their answer even though it would not affect their monetary tip. Every time I asked this question I always got the same answer, that the Big Bang is an atheistic theory.  This is just one example of the fact that many kids growing up in an evangelical church environment have the perception that the Big Bang is an idea which removes God as the creator.  It seems that many Christians may disdain the Big Bang.

Subsequent conversations with people of all ages have shown me that many individuals (1) don’t really understand what the Big Bang is, (2) don’t know the scientific evidence for the Big Bang, and (3) don’t comprehend the theistic significance of the Big Bang.   So let’s explore these ideas a little bit.

Here is his overview of the scientific evidence for the Big Bang:

There are three primary observations that are best explained by the Big Bang.  First, the universe is expanding so that it must have had a beginning of expansion in the past.  Second, because the universe was once very hot, we can still see the remnants of that heat in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation.  The latest measurements of the CMB spectrum made by the Planck satellite (shown above) agrees almost perfectly with theoretical calculations using the standard Big Bang cosmological model (see the plot at the end of this post).  Third, the theory predicts the amount of primordial light elements that should have been created in the first few minutes of the Big Bang, like hydrogen and helium.  Again the observations and the theoretical calculations align almost exactly.   A few other observations are supported by Big Bang predictions, like the distribution of galaxies and primordial gas.  The agreement between what we measure and what is expected from a Big Bang is so remarkable that just about all scientists accept the Big Bang as the origin of our universe, despite its implication that the universe had a beginning.

Does this scientific evidence support theism, or atheism?

Because we don’t have any observations that tell us exactly what happened “in the beginning” of our universe, we can only speculate.  But let me point out the obvious.  All of the observations we do have, and all the theoretical calculations, and even some projective calculations like the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem… give credence to the conclusion that all of the space, time, matter, and energy of this universe had a beginning.  The Big Bang is a misnomer for it is not some kind of explosion since there was nothing that existed to explode.  It is the origin of the universe.  So if this universe had a beginning, then the cause of the universe can not be a part of the universe.  The cause must be transcendent, like the Christian idea of God.  Is the fact that all the evidence points to our universe having a transcendent cause proof for God?  No, but it is extremely powerful evidence.  If one hundred years ago you had predicted that scientists would obtain unambiguous evidence about the history of the universe for 13.8 billion years, all of its lifetime except the first fraction of a second, and that all of the evidence would point to an actual beginning consistent with a transcendent cause, I don’t think anyone would have taken you seriously.  But that is exactly what has happened.  Theists could not have outlined a better scenario to support theism.  The scientific facts are completely consistent with the statement, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

I know how I account for this scientific discovery in my worldview: a non-physical mind that existed eternally created the physical universe at time t=0. But how do atheists, who can only explain the world by appealing to matter, explain the origin of matter itself?

Here’s Oxford University professor of physical chemistry (and atheist) Peter Atkins explaining how he grounds the Big Bang cosmology:

Easy! Nothing actually exists, according to Peter Atkins.

What about a theoretical physicist, like Lawrence Krauss? Well, he just redefines the nothing that causally preceded the origin of the universe so that it is actually something. Pure speculation, and it goes against the experimental scientific evidence we have. Exactly what you’d expect from a man who wrote a book about “the physics of Star Trek”.

Each of us has to come to terms with this scientific evidence. What could have caused the beginning of the universe? It can’t be matter, because this was the beginning of all the matter in the universe. It has to be a mind.

Although most theists have no problem with this scientific evidence, atheists really hate it. When I tell them about this evidence, they tell me that in a few years or decades, all the evidence for a beginning we have now will have gone away. “How do you know that?” I ask. We have faith” they reply. I don’t think anyone should deny the objective reality we all share just because it’s what they want to believe.