Tag Archives: Responsibility

News

New research shows that drug-facilitated sexual assault is a myth

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Story in the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Suzanne at Big Blue Wave)

Excerpt:

A toxicology expert from the Forensic Science Service, which analyses evidence for the police, told the Mail he had come across only one sample of blood or urine containing Rohypnol – the most commonly talked about ‘date-rape’ drug – in the past decade.

‘The reality is drink spiking is very, very rare’, said senior forensic scientist Michael Scott-Ham. ‘Alcohol itself is the problem.’

A controversial study, published last week, claimed drink spiking is an ‘urban myth’, a modern scapegoat for a generation of women who cannot face the fact that the vast amounts of alcohol many are imbibing could be in any way responsible for a loss of control, which can have devastating consequences.

‘Something very curious is going on,’ says Dr Adam Burgess, who spent a year researching the issue at the University of ‘s school of social policy for a project funded by the British Academy.

‘How can you account for this great big gap between lack of any evidence for drink spiking and what so many women believe is going on?

‘There’s a displacement exercise going on here. Why, despite all the evidence, do women so readily blame the spiker rather than the amount of alcohol they are drinking? That is the real issue here.’

[…]Could it be that women instinctively feel that if they admit to themselves how much they had drunk they would also be admitting they were somehow to blame for putting themselves at risk?

Believing your drink was spiked transfers the blame to a malevolent, external force, something which women have no control over. It shifts responsibility.

[…]Dr Burgess and his team interviewed 236 women at three universities in Kent, Sussex and London during 2006 and 2007.

They sought to investigate students’ knowledge of ‘date rape’ drugs, whether they or someone they knew had been a victim and whether they had changed their behaviour in relation to the perceived threat.

And consider closely how the attitudes of these women diverge from reality, such that they perceive themselves as helpless victims, even though they are in fact directly responsible for their own misfortunes.

Only ten out of the 236 claimed to have experienced drink spiking personally and none had been subject to sexual assault.

Yet 55 per cent claimed to have known someone whose drink had been spiked.

But among respondents, 75 per cent believed having a drink spiked with drugs was a more significant risk factor for sexual assault than drinking alcohol or taking drugs, despite the fact that police believe the opposite is true.

Another pivotal study offers further evidence that alcohol is the drug to be guarded against.

The study, conducted by the Forensic Science Service in 2005, examined 1,014 cases of ‘drug facilitated sexual assault’ by analysing blood and urine samples from victims gathered by police forces in England and .

In only 21 – about 2 per cent – were traces of drugs found that the women had not taken voluntarily.

These included Ecstasy, gammahydroxybutyrate (GHB) and tranquillisers. Alcohol was picked up in 46 per cent of cases. Illegal drugs such as cannabis and cocaine were in 34 per cent of cases.

Suzanne, who is pro-life, adds:

I am certain that massive amounts of alcohol consumption contributes to abortions in this country.

If you’re a woman who drinks large amounts of alcohol around strange men looking to score, you’re placing yourself in danger. That is the reality.

Unfortunately, people have a strange way of denying reality.

[…]You are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of your actions. Doing something stupid under the influence of alcohol is one of them. That’s obvious. So don’t get drunk.

Well said!

My previous article on women behaving irresponsibly is here. An article from Laura of Pursuing Holiness also talked about the danger of women refusing to take responsibility for their own choices. Her article has a lot of scary examples. And a previous post that documents how leniently women are treated when committing domestic violence is here. According to the best available research, women commit acts of domestic violence at about the same rate as men, even though male victims are almost never recognized by social services.

Videos

Video of Johnson-Provine debate on evolution vs physical evidence

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In 1994, when this debate was held, intelligent design was still pretty new. This debate, more than any other resource, clarified what was at stake in the debate over origins.

Provine makes clear what follows from the truth of evolution: no free will, no objective standard of good and evil, no life after death, no meaning in life. Johnson argues that the Cambrian explosion disproves Darwinian evolution, and the only reason why Darwinian evolution is widely-accepted is because materialism is pre-supposed.

If materialism is pre-supposed, then only atheistic answers to the origins question are allowed, so naturally Darwinism wins – it has to win once you make a philosophical assumption that matter is all there is. (An assumption contradicted by the big bang theory, which requires the creation of all matter from nothing.

Here’s a summary of the debate:

Debate before an audience between two professors on the naturalistic vs. the theistic way of understanding human existence.

William Provine, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, cites evidence supporting neo-Darwinian theory and argues that microevolutionary processes account for the origin of all life. He asserts that modern evolutionary theory is incompatible with belief in God; that there are no absolute moral and ethical laws; that free will does not exist; and that human character is merely a result of heredity and environment.

Phillip Johnson, Professor of Law at the University of California in Berkeley, agrees that modern neo-Darwinian theory is atheistic and scientific; however, as a general theory it is a philosophical dogma that is inconsistent with the evidence.

Provine and Johnson debate basic questions: Do we owe our existence to a creator? Can the blind watchmaker of natural selection take the place of God? Moderator is Timothy Jackson, Dept. of Religious Studies, Stanford University.

And here’s a couple of clips from the opening. (H/T Uncommon Descent via ECM)

The rest are  linked here.

This is very much worth watching, especially for atheists who typically are not aware that evolution rests on a philsophical assumption that is assumed, and that contradicts astrophysics. That has to stop. And the best way to stop it is by calling it out into the open using debates like this one.

For those of you behind a firewall, here are text excerpts.

And don’t forget about my recent post about the role of pre-suppositions like the pre-supposition of naturalism in historical Jesus research. The post contains debates where this is actually discussed as well.

News

New study reveals how school choice benefits the poorest students

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Article in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Jay P. Greene)

Excerpt:

Opponents of school choice are running out of excuses as evidence continues to roll in about the positive impact of charter schools.

Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby recently found that poor urban children who attend a charter school from kindergarten through 8th grade can close the learning gap with affluent suburban kids by 86% in reading and 66% in math. And now Marcus Winters, who follows education for the Manhattan Institute, has released a paper showing that even students who don’t attend a charter school benefit academically when their public school is exposed to charter competition.

Mr. Winters focuses on New York City public school students in grades 3 through 8. “For every one percent of a public school’s students who leave for a charter,” concludes Mr. Winters, “reading proficiency among those who remain increases by about 0.02 standard deviations, a small but not insignificant number, in view of the widely held suspicion that the impact on local public schools . . . would be negative.” It tuns out that traditional public schools respond to competition in a way that benefits their students.

[…]One of the most encouraging findings by Mr. Winters is how charter competition reduces the black-white achievement gap. He found that the worst-performing public school students, who tend to be low-income minorities, have the most to gain from the nearby presence of a charter school. Overall, charter competition improved reading performance but did not affect math skills. By contrast, low-performing students had gains in both areas, and their reading improvement was above average relative to the higher-performing students.

Conservatives love choice and competition, especially in education. We oppose equalizing outcomes regardless of individual liberty and responsibility. Liberals want government to run everything to make sure that everyone gets the same crap level of service. This is what the lazy teacher unions prefer. But conservatives want teachers to be responsive to their customers – the children.