Some helpful trigger warnings

Perhaps you have heard of trigger warnings, the new fads that’s swept parts of the internet over the past couple years and is no emerging into real life.  The idea is that there are certain topics which may provoke, or “trigger”, a particularly strong reaction among certain readers.  In some locales it’s become customary to place a trigger warning at the top of an article if it deals with something such as sexual violence, eating disorders, racism, or so forth.  Not surprisingly, colleges and universities are among the places where this type of thinking spread next.  Schools such as UC Stanta Barbara and Oberlin have announced policies requiring professors to offer warnings when a text may be “triggering”.

As one who is always will to assist in the promotion of great literature and education, I’ve decided to write the trigger warnings for some well-known reads:

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Brief update on the hoax at UVA

Robby Soave, the first prominent journalist to suggest that the entire Rolling Stone story was a hoax, has an update at Hit & Run.  There are more details from the three friends: Ryan Duffin, Alex Stock, and Kathryn Hendley.  Recall that in the original story, Jackie aggressively slandered these three, saying that after she showed up injured and bleeding and told them about being gang raped, they refused to contact the police and were only concerned about guarding their reputation and being loyal to their own frats.  The truth turned out to be the exact opposite.  When Jackie claimed that she had been forced to perform oral sex on a group of five men, the friends wanted to take her to the hospital and report it to the police; it was Jackie herself who refused to do so.

Anyhoo, the latest revelation is this: we now know the name that Jackie gave for the junior chem major boyfriend who supposedly lead the gang rape: Haven Monahan.  The Washington Post has confirmed that no such person ever existed, either at UVA or anywhere else.  Investigation of the text messages and emails that ‘Monahan’ supposedly sent to the three friends show that they come from fake phone numbers.  Jackie used a readily available website that allowed her to send messages from non-existent phone accounts.  So that would seem to wrap things up for the bogus claim that any sexual assault at all occurred on the night of September 28th, 2012.  The entire account was entirely fictional.

Meanwhile, over at Poynter, the Rolling Stone story has won the award for “Error of the Year”.  That’s just one of many awards that they give.  I highly recommend clicking the link and reading about all of them.  The funniest ones are the candidates for ‘Correction of the Year’.  Some samples:

In yesterday’s “Chillin’ Wit” column, a fond farewell to former Daily News editor Zack Stallberg as he heads west to New Mexico, stall berg was misquoted as using the term “horse manure.” He responded: “I demand a correction. Does anyone really think I would use the word ‘manure’?” No. Stall berg actually said, “horse s—.” And that’s no bull manure.

In a leader last month (Of bongs and bureaucrats, January 11th) we said that The Economist first proposed legalising drugs in 1993. In fact we argued for it in a cover story in 1988. Who says drug use doesn’t damage long-term memory?

An earlier version of this story erroneously said that Joaquín Guzmán was found in bed with his secretary. He was found with his wife. This version has been corrected.

An earlier version of this article described bald eagles and ospreys incorrectly. They eat fish, and their poop is white; they do not eat berries and excrete purple feces. (Other birds, like American robins, Eurasian starlings and cedar waxwings, do.)

“Do the Left Thing”: Stand up for free speech.

Here’s another on-campus story that’s not at all shocking, at least for anyone who follows life in the academic world.  A conservative student at the University of Michigan, Omar Mahmood, wrote a satirical column entitled ‘Do the Left Thing’, mocking the bizarre worldview of campus leftists.  He published it in one newspaper, the Michigan Review, and in response he lost his job at the mainstream campus newspaper, the Michigan Daily.  And then, in the least shocking development of all, four female students decided to post insults, threats, profanity, and racial slurs on his dorm room door and throw rotten eggs and hot dogs at it.

Here’s another unsurprising development.  The four enterprising progressives decided to disguise their identities by putting on hoodies.  They decided to don these hoodies right in front of a security camera, making it easy for campus security to identify them.  Read all about it here.

Of course the best way to respond to censorship is by reading whatever the bad guys are trying to censor.  So click here to read the offending column, and while you’re at it, drop by The Michigan Review as well.

One last post on the UVA case

I’ve written a great deal about this case because it means a lot to me, for reasons I’ve explained before.  Nonetheless I’m trying to avoid going overboard on this one issue.  Hence this will be my last post on the case, at least until something important arrives, such as a police investigation.

Okay, first topic: what’s the response from Sabrina Erdely and Rolling Stone?  Answer: almost none.  Erdely seems to have gone into hiding; it’s been almost two weeks since anyone heard from her.  Rolling Stone, meanwhile, has altered its initial statement after widespread complaints that it was trying to put the blame on Jackie.  Other than that, nothing.  As Richard Bradley and many others have been saying, these people are cowards.  They should be coming forward and admitting fault.

Of course both Erdely and everyone else at Rolling Stone has good reason to hide.  They’ve committed the biggest journalistic fraud since Dan Rather and his phony memos.  They’re going to be infamous for years to come.  Erdely’s name will forever be listed next to Stephen Glass as a notorious liar and fabricator who fooled major publications.

Further, it’s not just this one story.  Conservative sources have started poking into everything else Erdely has ever written and much of it is clearly fake.  Mollie Hemingway has a good summary of it.  Erdely won’t be writing any journalism anytime soon, but she has a career has a trashy romance novelist waiting for her if she wants it.

Next topic: what actually happened at UVA?  The latest revelations from the Washington Post show that we’re closing in on the an answer.  Our protagonist, “Jackie”, began playing an elaborate prank soon after arriving at UVA for her freshman year.  She told her friends about her super-hot chemistry major boyfriends, even sending false texts and photos.  Then for some reason it morphed into a story about this guy leading a brutal gang rape in a frat house.  Over time Jackie has changed nearly every detail: the name of the boyfriend, the number of attackers, the location, and more.  The three friends also did an interview with ABC news   As Hanna Rosin puts it, we are inching closer to the moment when the entire story becomes an acknowledged hoax.

Next topic: the response.  Ever since the Post first exposed the flaws in the story, many liberals and feminists have been wringing their hands about the possibility that this will perpetuate the stereotype of “the girl who cried rape” and make true victims of sexual assault less likely to come forward.  While such fears aren’t entirely groundless, I think they’re exaggerated.  The actual, factual evidence that women are intimidated into silence is rather thin.

What liberals really fear is obvious and well-grounded.  People will trust the liberal media less as a result of this.  And well they should.  The difference between Erdely’s disaster and a typical political story in The New York Times is one of degree, not kind.  If skepticism about the media goes up, so much the better.

I will say that some amazingly dumb arguments have sprung up as a result of this.  Here, for instance, we have a student making a stunning argument:

If everyone here believed Jackie’s story until yesterday — a story in which she is violently raped by seven men at a fraternity house as part of a planned initiation ritual — should we not still be concerned?  There was something in that story which stuck. And that means something.

Okay, the wording is careful.  That “means something”; no word on what it means exactly, but the implication is clear.  Since people believe that a fraternity would commit organized gang rape in its frat house, then it must happen, even if this particular case is a fabrication.

I don’t think the student who wrote this is taking Logic 101.  If a magazine publishes a phony story and numerous people at UVA and across the country believe it, that doesn’t necessarily mean the story was plausible or that anything like the story has even taken place.  It may simply be that UVA and other places around the country have lots of credulous fools.  (Pardon my bluntness, but someone’s gotta’ say it.)

Final topic: what’s the appropriate response to all this?  How should we feel about the victims?  First, we must remember who the victims are.  They are the men false accused of rape, two that Jackie named and all the members of Phi Kappa Psi.  These people deserve nothing but sympathy.  They also deserve a big cash settlement from Rolling Stone, and they’re nearly certain to get one.

And, a bit more problematically, they deserve a settlement from Jackie.  Obviously Rolling Stone is the bigger, better target.  Nonetheless I find it likely that at least one person or group will sue Jackie herself.  If so, she’ll be forced to testify under oath about what took place and may, financially, lose everything.  On top of that, there’s a police investigation still underway.  If Jackie lied to the Police, she may even end up serving time in jail.

Should we feel sympathy towards her?  Sort of.  She’s a college student who did something stupid.  I was once a college student who did stupid things.  I’m glad that those things didn’t continue to follow me all my life.  I’d imagine most folks would say the same thing.  Jackie happened to take her bad decisions a few steps too far and will be paying for it for a long time.  Perhaps the real lesson to learn from this is that we need to do a better job of teaching our young people about responsibility, honesty, and empathy, and we need to do it at an earlier age.

More thoughts on the UVA rape hoax

(Continuing from my previous post.)

Another obvious question about this whole mess is: what exactly happened?  It seems clear that Sabrina Rubin Erdely went shopping for a story about rich, white guys committing rape.  She toured several campuses and was eventually connected to “Jackie”, the UVA student who provided the tale.  Erdely published a story chock-full of details, and virtually every detail that can be checked has turned out to be false.  The story says that Jackie was raped at a party at Phi Kappa Psi on the date of September 28, 2012.  In reality, the frat didn’t hold a party on that date.  Jackie says that a particular student named “Drew”–she gave his full name to the Washington Post–dated her for several weeks before taking her to the party and gang-raping her along with his frat buddies.  In reality, this man has never even met Jackie, doesn’t belong to that frat, isn’t a lifeguard (another detail that Jackie supplied about him), and in short, is a completely innocent victim of Jackie’s claims.  So Jackie certainly lied; shame on her.

But the question is, how many of the lies come from Jackie and how many from Erdely?  The logical thing would be to ask both Jackie and Erdely.  Unfortunately Erdely seems to have gone into hiding.  Jackie doesn’t seem to be saying much either, though her father has given an unimpressive and unhelpful interview to a British tabloid.  So it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll be getting a clear picture from the two people who could actually provide answers.

Then there’s the question of what actual events occurred?  Was Jackie raped or assaulted?  Some people continue to insist that she was, citing friends who claim she told them about such an assault on the night it allegedly happened.  Well, that’s something that us mere observers can’t know.  Perhaps she was, perhaps not.

On to the next question: why did this hoax happen?  Why on earth did Erdely think she could get away with it?  Why didn’t Rolling Stone uphold even the slightest bit of journalistic standards?

Well, it’s because of the culture, folks.  Brendan O’Neill gives us an excellent article on the ‘Cult of Credulity’.  Many sources, including supposedly intelligent sources, are telling us that we should automatically believe any rape accusation.  Of course this is atrocious–a flat violation of the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”.  But leftists don’t do principles.

And it’s spreading.  On the same day that the Washington Post blew the lid on the UVA case, they also help expose the fact that Lena Dunham had made a blatantly false accusation of rape, aimed at an innocent man.  Now her publisher is furiously backtracking, apparently having realized that a libel lawsuit is likely to be on the way.  It seems like falsely accusing college guys of rape is the trendy new thing to do, at least among wealthy white liberal women.

I leave you today with a link to this essay: Everything is Problematic.  In it a college student (amazingly) doesn’t accuse anyone of rape, but instead documents her journey away from the political far left.  Among the factors that caused her to flee: anti-intellectualism, dogmatism, and self-delusion.  No kidding.

Thoughts for the day

After being absent from the blog for nearly two years, I’ve returned with four posts about the recent gang rape charges at UVA published by Rolling Stone, which turned out to be a hoax.  Okay, that’s a bit odd.  Why do I care so much about this story?

Every forum thread and comment section on the internet devoted to this topic has overflowed with comments from UVA students and alumni.  For the record, I am neither a student nor an alumnus.  I did, however, live near Charlottesville for seven years, and had many friends among the students and faculty at the school.  In that sense, it makes me particularly angry that Rolling Stone picked UVA as the target of its slander.  If they’d instead made up a fictional rape case set at, say, the University of Alabama, it would be just as much a moral outrage, but it wouldn’t be so personal for me.

That said, it is a moral outrage.  Accusing someone of rape, when you know that person didn’t commit rape, is a terrible thing to do.  The ninth Commandments is “Thou shall not bear false witness”.  Many translations give it as “Thou shall not lie”, but the original Hebrew makes it clear and specific: we should not falsely accuse others of crimes.  For Jews and Christians, this has been a part of the basic moral order for thousands of years.  Of course, the left-wingers who run publications like Rolling Stone and most major universities in this country proudly reject our Judeo-Christian heritage, so it shouldn’t be too surprising when they bear false witness shamelessly.

Well, whatever being wrote the Ten Commandments was right.  It is wrong to falsely accuse anyone of any crime.  It is wrong for the same reason that rape is wrong.  Rape harms other people.  So does a false accusation.  Rape is selfish.  So is a false accusation.  Rape treats other people as worthless.  So does a false accusation.  This should be obviously and clear to all thinking people.

Regrettably, many on the left don’t seem to see it that way.  Examples have multipled, but here are two much-quoted examples.  A UVA student wrote an essay in Politico saying, “to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake.”  Meanwhile over at The New Republic, Rebecca Traister tells us this:

The dismantling of Erdely’s story—both by anti-feminist agonistes and by those genuinely dismayed by possible journalistic error—would mean that Jackie’s story of being beaten and raped by seven fraternity brothers will be dismissed, and that the reading public will be permitted to slip back into the comforting conviction that stories like Jackie’s aren’t real, that rapes like that don’t happen, that our system works, and that, of course, bitches lie.  What we will all be allowed to happily forget is that there are plenty of real stories of rape: of violent rape, frat house rape, gang rape, date rape; that most rape accusers do not lie and that in fact it’s quite likely, statistically, that Jackie herself did not lie.

Actually, to allow fact-checking to define the narrative is exactly the right thing to do.  Facts matter.  Truth matters.  Separating true from false matters.

As for Traister’s statement, it’s quite telling.  Supposedly “the reading public”, which presumably doesn’t include Traister herself, has a comforting conviction that rape isn’t real and never happens.  In reality, no one believes this.  Everyone knows that rape is a real problem and does happen.  Traister is railing against a non-existent position.

Fortunately there are a few folks still standing up for reason.  I highly recommend reading all of the following:

Emily Yoffe says that The Putative Epidemic of Campus Rape is Pushing Colleges to Adopt Policies Unfair to Men.

Judith Levine takes to task the absurd feminist responses to the whole story: “Feminism Can Handle the Truth.”

And Mollie Hemingway points out that Sabrina Rubin Erdely has a long history of writing utterly absurd stories and passing them off as true.  Why haven’t her lies been exposed before?

Hoax Evidence

(Continued from my previous post)

Okay, so the Rolling Stone article is looking like a hoax.  Nothing sure yet.  It might turn out to be entirely true, but the smart money’d definitely on hoax.  What’s the evidence?  Well, the skeptics that I’ve linked to have already pointed out several things:

1. Supposedly in the room where Jackie was raped, there was a glass table that got shattered, and both her and the rapists rolled around in broken glass for several hours.  Clearly this is not remotely plausible.

2. Afterwards, Jackie supposedly went downstairs, where the crowded party was still going on.  She was supposedly bleeding profusely at the time.  And yet nobody noticed this.

3. The very notion that a group of nine frat boys at a major university would carefully plan a gang rape is quite far-fetched.  Moreover, one line in Erdely’s article implies that this gang rape was part of an initiation ritual, which is even more far-fetched.

4. It’s being alleged, though only in comments on other blog posts so far, that the details don’t add up.  UVA frat boys pledge in the Spring semester, but the alleged assault occurred in September.  Supposedly the frat party was continuing until early morning; in reality, parties don’t last that long.

5. Proper journalism requires names of witness, not anonymity; it requires the journalist to speak with anyone accused of a crime and allow them to respond.  A simple read of the article shows that Erdely made no attempt to reach even these low standards.  The Washington Post has just posted this: “Rolling Stone whiffs in reporting on alleged rape.”

6. Moreover, Erdely doesn’t seem to have any coherent explanation.  When asked about these lapses in her reporting, she’s babbled out incoherent responses full of “sort of’s” and “kind of’s” and “I guess’s”.

On top of that, I’ll add some reasons of my own.

7. Rolling Stone is not a credible source.  It is better known for topless pictures of Britney Spears than for anything resembling journalism.  It’s is shamelessly left-wing and routinely attacks groups that it doesn’t like: Republicans, conservatives, Christians, capitalists, and others.  An attack on a bunch of rich, white frat boys fits perfectly with the magazine’s biases.

8. Erdely provides many direct quotes, supposedly from Jackie and her friends.  They don’t sound remotely like actual college students.  “Her reputation will be shot for the next four years”.  “She’s gonna be the girl who cried ‘rape,’ and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.”  This is not what actual college students sound like.  It’s more like what a clueless journalist thinks that college students sound like.

9. What’s true about Erdely’s dialogue is also true about her whole story.  We’re being asked to believe that minutes after a young woman was gang raped and was bleeding badly, her friends cared nothing about her, but only about the reputations and access to frat parties.  This isn’t realistic.  It’s more like a parody of fraternity and sorority culture.  And the reason why it sounds so much like a parody of fraternity and sorority culture is that, in all probability, it is a parody.  In other words, it’s a work of fiction designed to attack and mock certain types of people.

As I said at the start, the whole story might be true.  But certainly at this point, any credible evaluation of the evidence (or lack thereof) would lead to the conclusion that it’s probably a hoax.  If we learn in the future that Erdely made the whole thing up from scratch, that there was no real “Jackie” and no friends of Jackie, that Erdely’s goal was to smear rich, white people and nothing more.  Time, I hope, will bring the truth to light.

(The list of evidence continues in the next post.)

Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax? Probably.

The story goes like this.  Two weeks ago, Rolling Stone magazine published a lengthy article about a brutal rape that supposedly took place in a frat house at the University of Virginia.  According to the magazine, a young woman named “Jackie” was lead upstairs to a darkened room and gang-raped by a group of frat boys for several hours.  Afterwards she fled the house and encountered three friends, who encouraged her not to report the crime or go to the hospital.  Jackie suffered severe mental trauma.  She contacted the university’s officer in charge of sexual assault claims, but nothing came of that.

Now that Rolling Stone has brought the story to light, everyone’s in a tizzy.  Other national media outlets took the story at face value.  Outraged protestors stormed around the UVA campus.  The frat house where the alleged assault took place was thoroughly vandalized.  Administrators promised swift and decisive action, starting with abolishing all Greek life activity at UVA for the next several weeks.  Some commentators speculated that this would be a turning point in the struggle to bring the problem of on-campus sexual assault to light.  The entire country seemed to be marching in lock-step in response to Rolling Stone’s article.

Then reality caught up.

It began when Richard Bradley, veteran journalist and editor, published a skeptical take on the article, noting obvious flaws and logical contradictions.  That was on Nov. 24.  Then, on Nov. 28, the Washington Post dug in, pointing out that the author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, hadn’t carefully interviewed enough witnesses and had made other mistakes.  Yesterday, Reason magazine asked whether the whole story was a gigantic hoax.  Today the floodgates burst open: outlets ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the L. A. Times to The New Republic have started asking serious questions, and Erdely seems to be on the run, not wanting to talk to anyone anymore.

(In my next post, I’ve gathered together some evidence that it is all a hoax.)

You can’t make this stuff up: Harvard Edition

From the pages of The Harvard Crimson comes this note about a mass cheating scandal.  It seems that more than a hundred students are being investigated for serious allegations of copying and plagiarism on their final exam.  The class in question: Government 1310: “Introduction to Congress”.

Now where could someone immersed in the study of Congress possibly get the idea of sleaziness and dishonesty?

Religion and Education: Let’s Hammer Dawkins Some More

This picks up where my previous post left off.  There I responded to a claim by Richard Dawkins, who insisted that more education will surely lead to less religion.  I found eight peer reviewed research papers testifying to a positive relationship between religiosity and education.  By any standard, eight papers is a lot, and sufficient to prove firmly that Dawkins’ claim is completely untrue.  But since one can never have too much fun crushing this sort of nonsense, here are some more.

Glanville, J. L., Sikkink, D. and Hernández, E. I., RELIGIOUS INVOLVEMENT AND EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES: The Role of Social Capital and Extracurricular Participation (2008) The Sociological Quarterly, 49: 105–137

Using structural equation models to analyze data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we examine the potential role of social capital and extracurricular participation in mediating the relationship between religious participation and academic achievement, dropping out of high school, and attachment to school. We find that religious attendance promotes higher intergenerational closure, friendship networks with higher educational resources and norms, and extracurricular participation.

Mark D. Regnerus, Shaping Schooling Success: Religious Socialization and Educational Outcomes in Metropolitan Public Schools. (Sept. 2000) Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 363-370

This paper analyzes religious socialization as it relates to schooling success. I propose and test a multilevel model of involvement in church activities as providing integration and motivation toward schooling success among metropolitan U.S. public high school sophomores. Results indicate that respondents’ participation in church activities is related to heightened educational expectations, and that these more intensely religious students score higher on standardized math/reading tests, even while controlling for variables that often show religious effects to be spurious.

Donahue, M. J. and Benson, P. L., Religion and the Well-Being of Adolescents. Journal of Social Issues (1995) 51: page 145–160

A literature review of the relation between religiousness and adolescent well-being is presented, along with new analyses from a large adolescent data base. It is found that the average level of religiousness of U.S. adolescents has not declined recently, although it does appear to decrease on average across the years of adolescence. African Americans are more religious than whites, and girls are more religious than boys. Religiousness is positively associated with prosocial values and behavior, and negatively related to suicide ideation and attempts, substance abuse, premature sexual involvement, and delinquency. It is unrelated to self-esteem. These results are found to be robust after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics.

Annebert Dijkstra and Jules L. Peschar, Religious Determinants of Academic Attainment in the Netherlands.  Comparative Education Review (Feb. 1996) Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 47-65

Students who held a strong “Christian worldview” and whose families attended religious services scored higher academically than those who did not report religious involvement.

Smith, C., Theorizing Religious Effects Among American Adolescents. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2003), 42: pages 17–30

The influence of church attendance and favorable perceptions of religion on “positive school attitudes” is evident from childhood, through late adolescence, and into college.

William Jeynes, The Effect of Religious Commitment on the Academic Achievement of Urban and Other Children, Education and Urban Society (2003) 36, no. 44, pages 44-62

Table 1 indicates that veryreligious children achieve at higher levels academicallythan their less religious counterparts in the cases of both the total and urban samples. Using the Basic I Model, veryreligious students outperform less religious students on all the measures of academic achievement.

Sandra L. Hanson & Alan L. Ginsburg, Gaining Ground: Values and High School Success. American Educational Research Journal (1988) 25, no. 3 pages 334-65.

One analysis of tenth grade students found that, for both black and white students, the impact of pro-social values was stronger than the effect of socioeconomic status on reading and math proficiency (44 percent greater for white students and 51 percent greater for black students). Their study consisted of a national sample of 30,000 10th-grade students from the “High School and Beyond” surveys of 1980 and 1982.  The study also showed that holding religious values was associated with higher math scores for black students.

Carl L. Bankston & Min Zhou, The Ethnic Church, Ethnic Identification, and the Social Adjustment of Vietnamese Adolescents. Review of Religious Research (1996) 38, no. 1

Among Vietnamese immigrants, frequent religious attendance correlates to adolescents placing a greater importance on attending college, earning good grades, and avoiding substance abuse.

Conclusion: We have now seen sixteen peer-reviewed studies, all of which document a positive connection between religion and education.  The evidence is overwhelming: Dawkins is wrong.  His beliefs are precisely the opposite of the truth, as they are on so many issues.  To put the final nail in the coffin, we should note a few facts about the evidence presented above.

First, the evidence is good evidence by scholarly standards.  It comes from real academic journals, and comes from many scholars who are prestigious in their fields.  These studies were properly conducted.  The sample sizes were large, in the thousands or tens of thousands in many cases.

Second, the results are robust.  We have seen that the positive relationship between religiosity and education holds in many places.  It holds for people from countries as diverse as the United States, the Netherlands, and Vietnam.  It holds for all races and all social classes.  It holds for those in early childhood, the high school years, the college years, and beyond.  It holds for many different measures of education, from grades to attendance to test scores to graduation rates.