Post: #1

Excellent article by George Will in the Washington Post about the absurdity on today's campuses, with their rape hysteria and 'trigger warning' BS.

Quote:Colleges become the victims of progressivism

By George F. Will, Published: June 6

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.

Consider the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. “sexual assault.” Herewith, a Philadelphia magazine report about Swarthmore College, where in 2013 a student “was in her room with a guy with whom she’d been hooking up for three months”:

“They’d now decided — mutually, she thought — just to be friends. When he ended up falling asleep on her bed, she changed into pajamas and climbed in next to him. Soon, he was putting his arm around her and taking off her clothes. ‘I basically said, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you.” And then he said, “OK, that’s fine” and stopped. . . . And then he started again a few minutes later, taking off my panties, taking off his boxers. I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep.’”

Six weeks later, the woman reported that she had been raped. Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of “sexual assault” victims. It vows to excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults.

The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20 percent.

Education Department lawyers disregard pesky arithmetic and elementary due process. Threatening to withdraw federal funding, the department mandates adoption of a minimal “preponderance of the evidence” standard when adjudicating sexual assault charges between males and the female “survivors” — note the language of prejudgment. Combine this with capacious definitions of sexual assault that can include not only forcible sexual penetration but also nonconsensual touching. Then add the doctrine that the consent of a female who has been drinking might not protect a male from being found guilty of rape. Then comes costly litigation against institutions that have denied due process to males they accuse of what society considers serious felonies.

Now academia is unhappy about the Education Department’s plan for government to rate every institution’s educational product. But the professors need not worry. A department official says this assessment will be easy: “It’s like rating a blender.” Education, gadgets — what’s the difference?

Meanwhile, the newest campus idea for preventing victimizations — an idea certain to multiply claims of them — is “trigger warnings.” They would be placed on assigned readings or announced before lectures. Otherwise, traumas could be triggered in students whose tender sensibilities would be lacerated by unexpected encounters with racism, sexism, violence (dammit, Hamlet, put down that sword!) or any other facet of reality that might violate a student’s entitlement to serenity. This entitlement has already bred campus speech codes that punish unpopular speech. Now the codes are begetting the soft censorship of trigger warnings to swaddle students in a “safe,” “supportive,” “unthreatening” environment, intellectual comfort for the intellectually dormant.

It is salutary that academia, with its adversarial stance toward limited government and cultural common sense, is making itself ludicrous. Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses — by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations — brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates.

What government is inflicting on colleges and universities, and what they are inflicting on themselves, diminishes their autonomy, resources, prestige and comity. Which serves them right. They have asked for this by asking for progressivism.

Post: #2

We'll have a good number of breakdowns like these written with logic and intelligence.

That's the problem. History has shown us that hysteria does not respond to reason. Better to let the witch hunt continue and watch this shit burn from the sidelines.

Post: #3

It's a decent article just because it's good to see anyone challenge this evil hysteria.

But the real victims are not faceless "colleges" -- who gives a fuck about them. The victims are actual young dudes whose lives are being ruined by this. Will's article is a little odd in its concentration on "institutions" rather than the terrible human cost -- which makes it read as somewhat dry and bloodless.

Post: #4

Nice op-ed. "You reap what you sow." "You asked for a progressive state, and now you have one. Hoist by your own petard. (Literally, blown up by your own grenade blast)"

(06-07-2014 03:57 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  But the real victims are not faceless "colleges" -- who gives a fuck about them. The victims are actual young dudes whose lives are being ruined by this. Will's article is a little odd in its concentration on "institutions" rather than the terrible human cost -- which makes it read as somewhat dry and bloodless.

Lizard, he is not diminishing the injustice that many males now face in university so much as he is shoving the irony of the situation in the face of progressives. After all, the #1 rule about being a progressive is to forever ignore the negative consequences of progressive policy - instead you must always claim even more progressivism is needed to salve the latest woes. (The #1 rule of being a mainstream conservative is to defend yesterday's progressivism as if it were the bastion of morality and good sense.)

His silence on what's happening to men may be tactical - the people stumping for increased policing of sexual assault accusations are probably not going to care about those men, and Will's audience of mainstream conservatives would be cagey about supporting men accused of sexual assault. But by raising the specter of progressivism, putting it as the culprit, he can rally shallow conservatives to oppose the rape hysteria crowd.

Post: #5

Basil, I understand his point, but to be honest I don't even know how valid it is. Are "universities" -- meaning, their administrations etc -- really finding the experience all that "excruciating"? What is the evidence that academia is particularly unhappy about any of this? They may grumble about this or that bureaucratic inconvenience, but on the whole they seem eager to comply with these increasingly insane requirements in the name of "protecting women from sexual assault".

I don't believe for a moment that the people who run these institutions regard "academic autonomy" as some sacred value that should trump feminist or progressive ideology in any serious context. Maybe there are a few dinosaurs who feel this way; but the boomers and Xers who run the show are, for the most part, hungry to fall in line.

Of course if they start seeing significantly diminished donations from rich alums as a result of this, they might come around to a very different view of the situation. But I don't see that happening so far. So long as the funds keep flowing, they will be happy as the pigs they are.

Post: #6

(06-07-2014 04:13 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  Basil, I understand his point, but to be honest I don't even know how valid it is. Are "universities" -- meaning, their administrations etc -- really finding the experience all that "excruciating"? What is the evidence that academia is particularly unhappy about any of this? They may grumble about this or that bureaucratic inconvenience, but on the whole they seem eager to comply with these increasingly insane requirements in the name of "protecting women from sexual assault".

Actually, it's turning out to be a thorn in its side. They're between a rock and a hard place - the government is cracking down while accused men are starting to fight back and sue universities. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. The chaotic legal situation demands resolution, but unless the Justice department scales back its rape hysteria campaign, the chaos will continue. And it's highly unlikely that the Justice Department will scale back - fucking everyone in politics is milking this, because who could be so evil as to oppose helpless rape victims? McCain, Obama, everyone gets to look good and righteous!

This brings to mind the quote that goes roughly "everyone is a conservative when it comes to their own interests." Universities by and large would never sacrifice autonomy to the government if they didn't have to, or if there wasn't anything else to sweeten the pot (eg grants and subsidies).

Post: #7

Sue, sue, sue.

Lawsuit the living shit out of them. Be rapacious. Squeeze every damned dollar you can out of it. Sue the girl's parents. Sue the sororities. Sue everybody. Make everybody completely miserable. They will squeal like pigs. Crush them.

Post: #8

Quote:. . . And then he started again a few minutes later, taking off my panties, taking off his boxers. I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep.’”

I've heard this attitude from girls speaking about their sexual past many times.

It's the utter-laziness of privileged women, illustrated.

If someone was trying to stick their dick into you, would you let them do it just because you felt a bit tired and wanted to get to sleep faster?

Post: #9

(06-07-2014 04:56 PM)AnonymousBosch Wrote:  

Quote:. . . And then he started again a few minutes later, taking off my panties, taking off his boxers. I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep.’”

I've heard this attitude from girls speaking about their sexual past many times.

It's the utter-laziness of privileged women, illustrated.

If someone was trying to stick their dick into you, would you let them do it just because you felt a bit tired and wanted to get to sleep faster?

Of course it sounds better than: "I said no, but then we started messing around a bit and I got turned on so I let him slip his dick inside me."

But who knows, anything could have happened. Especially once she waited 6 weeks to tell anyone.

Post: #10

(06-07-2014 03:58 PM)Basil Ransom Wrote:  he is shoving the irony of the situation in the face of progressives. After all, the #1 rule about being a progressive is to forever ignore the negative consequences of progressive policy - instead you must always claim even more progressivism is needed to salve the latest woes.

Bingo.

Post: #11

This article pissed people off so badly it's actually inspired other articles. Here is one (Huffington Post ran one but it's not worth posting). Gotta give the guy credit. Hope he doesn't apologize for his opinion.

The following is from The Wire and ran on Yahoo. Link at the end:

George Will, an occasionally controversial opinion writer for the Washington Post, decided to tackle the epidemic of campus sexual assault, and it did not go well. Will starts off his latest column claiming that colleges working to fight sexual assault are breeding an environment that makes "victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges" to students, to give you some sense of where this is going. From there, he addresses the "supposed campus epidemic of rape," and how he thinks it's all a bunch of hooey.

The reaction to Will's column was swift and cutting. "Oh good, we finally get to get rid of George Will," said one person, hoping the Post may dump Will for implying students should aspire to be sexually assaulted. "George Will writes about sexual assault on campus and it goes as well as you might expect," said Politico deputy editor Blake Hounshell. "Wow. Clearly, George Will has never been sexually assaulted," added columnist Ann Friedman. The Huffington Post's Paul Blumenthal took the historical route: "George Will: Blue jeans are evil and should be stopped, rape not such a big deal."

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Will blames the sexual assault hullabaloo on faulty math, dangerous progressivism, and girls who drink too much, among other things. It's never the boy's fault, especially in the anecdote he chose, in which a girl's sometimes-boyfriend has sex with her after she repeatedly says no. Shortly after, Will puts sexual assault inside scare quotes.

In Will's mind, the Obama administration's recent attempt to clean up sexual assault on campus is ridiculous. "[The administration] vows to excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults," he says.

Will tries to dabble in math in the middle of the op-ed to prove the sexual assault epidemic isn't real, and fails miserably. Will reasons that one sample size at a large university (Ohio State) that doesn't quite match up with reported statistics on sexual assault disproves the entire thing. If one in five women are sexually assaulted in college, and 12 percent of rapes go unreported, then this single university that doesn't add up disproves the entire sexual assault conspiracy, Will argues. One carefully chosen, flawed example does not disprove the whole, especially in the messy world of categorizing sexual assault. These situations rarely fit squarely into a fixed box definition. Will should stick to causing outrage with his words — data journalism is trendy, sure, but he's terrible at it.

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But really this is an opportunity for Will to attack both the Obama administration and progressivism in one go, a two-birds-with-one-stone opportunity too ripe for a conservative troll to pass up. Colleges fighting to foster more inclusive, safer environments are dumbing down and softening up the next generation, and the administration is helping them, he says. We should just ignore his ignorant argument in the same manner Will thinks we should ignore sexual assault.

This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/06/...us/372434/

Post: #12

(06-07-2014 03:51 PM)thedude3737 Wrote:  We'll have a good number of breakdowns like these written with logic and intelligence.

That's the problem. History has shown us that hysteria does not respond to reason. Better to let the witch hunt continue and watch this shit burn from the sidelines.

Articles like these aren't to respond to the hysteria.

They identify like men who think differently, that they may congregate and form a bloc to oppose hysteria.

Someone should forward this guy a link to the RVF. Here's a home for him.

Wald

Post: #13

Found a reasonable comment on this piece on Will's article at Salon. Don't bother reading the piece, it is so full of shit so don't bother.

Quote:Does anybody really believe the 1-in-5 number? It seems to me that if we did--if we believed that 20% of college women would be raped or sexually assaulted, and left violated and traumatized by the attack, at some point during their college career--we wouldn't think that some changes to the procedures by which administrators adjudicated sexual misconduct cases was sufficient, at all.

We'd be dealing with a crime epidemic like none we've ever seen. I live in a city regarded by many as the most dangerous in the country. In 2012, according to crime statistics, about 2% of the total population reported being the victim of a violent crime (including rape), and that was the highest crime rate in the entire nation. We would be saying that women on college campuses are at least 10 times more likely to be victims of a sexual assault than anybody living in the most dangerous city in the nation is to be a victim of any kind of violent crime.

It seems to me that, if that were actually happening and we actually believed it, we'd be calling for much more than changes of the standards of evidence or the definitions of consent. We'd want heavily armed guards on every floor of every dorm. We'd ban off-campus parties. We'd be demanding that the budget for campus security be increased ten-fold, rather than wanting to see the budgets for rape crisis centers increased. We'd insist on single-sex dorms. We'd want curfews enforced. And, we'd think twice before we sent our daughters to college. If I truly believed that my daughter had a 20% chance of suffering lifelong trauma from a sexual assault if she went to college, she'd be attending the college closest to home, commuting, and not allowed to be on the campus outside of class time.

In a country where, as a Salon piece from a week ago showed, people won't leave their children in cars for 3 minutes because they fear they'll be abducted out of a locked car by a murderous pedophile (an event that has never, as far as I know, actually occurred), it is simply ludicrous to imagine that we'd be eagerly, triumphantly sending our 18-year-old daughters off en masse to places where we really believed they had a 1-in-5 chance of being sexually violated and traumatized for life.

So, in reality, we either don't believe the numbers, or we don't think the kinds of things defined as "sexual assault" are really all that serious. If we believed either of those things, and all we wanted was some changes in the process of adjudicating sexual misconduct, we'd be insane and irresponsible. We'd be at least 10 time more worried about our daughters if they were on an Ivy League college campus than if they were living in Detroit, MI, and yet that's not the case, for anyone.

This commenter, Anonymous Mom, goes on to stomp out a man telling her what sexual assault is and is not and the epidemic of sexual entitlement of men:

Quote:What recourse do you think they should have? Sending a 16yo kid to jail for a while? A lifetime on a sex offender registry? Expelling him from school? I'd say a girl calling you out as an asshole in the hallway is sufficient. Do it again, you might get a knee to the groin. Do it again after that, and then I might consider reporting you, because at that point I've made my boundaries very clear and you continue to violate them.

Living among other human beings means you sometimes have encounters you didn't want. Most of the time, those unwanted encounters are benign. And, yes, I and many other women would consider having your breast or butt briefly touched a benign unwanted encounter. My breasts are actually not sacred, and having them briefly touched while I'm fully clothed isn't actually more harmful or traumatic than having somebody give me a hug I don't want or touching my hair when I don't want or patting my pregnant belly when I don't want. None of that is assault, and it's absolutely trivializing what real assault victims go through to claim otherwise.

You don't need to mansplain to me what assault is. As a woman, I'm capable of determining for myself whether I was "literally assaulted" or not. I refuse to conflate the uncomfortable or even merely annoying--which is where I place things like catcalling and momentary groping--with the traumatic.

And, "rape culture"? This is an idea that sounds so interesting and progressive but is just silly. What human society has NOT been a rape culture, exactly? As far as I know, rape has existed in every society for all of human history. Catcalling has nothing to do with "rape culture," because women are raped in societies where it is considered unacceptable for men to speak to women in public. Groping has nothing to do with "rape culture," because women are raped in societies where men and women are not allowed to touch outside of marriage. Frat parties have nothing to do with "rape culture," because women are raped in cultures that have never heard of frat parties and would never allow them. Human culture is rape culture, just like it's murder culture and theft culture.

The idea that modern bourgeois American society--where people are safer than any human beings have ever been before and women have more advantages than women ever have, and rates of sexual assault have steadily dropped since we've started keeping track of them--is somehow this "rape culture" where women are uniquely vulnerable would be laughable if it weren't so incredibly privileged and historically- and culturally-ignorant.

Post: #14

Quote:George Will’s distasteful conclusions about sexual assault
BY ALYSSA ROSENBERG
June 10 at 4:31 pm

My colleague George Will has become the subject of wide-spread outrage for a column published online last Friday that seems undergirded by a pair of deeply troubling assumptions.



First, he says in the lead of the piece that “when [colleges and universities] make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.” Second, Will suggests that the Obama administration’s initiative on campus sexual assault is an attempt to “excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults,” arguing that young men will be railroaded in order to confirm young women’s sense that they are victims.



It saddens me that Will would think so poorly not just of American institutions of higher learning, but of young women, who he seems to see as simultaneously precocious and irresponsible.


His column, though, is a useful example of beliefs about sexual assault that persist despite evidence to contradict them. And it is an opportunity to examine why some of those beliefs are so powerful and persistent.
It is not clear what Will believes to be the benefits that would make being a sexual assault survivor a “coveted status.”

Certainly rape and sexual harassment survivors have fought long battles to make their voices and experiences count for more in policy debates. The right to be able to speak about your experience and have your testimony be received respectfully seems like a rather meager reward to claim for an experience that involves physical violation and pain, immense social stigma and psychological damage. The same is true for any other accommodations, like the right to withdraw for a semester or to take exams late, that colleges and universities might extend to students who report being sexually assaulted.

If Will is correct that being a survivor is “a coveted status,” students might at a minimum be pleased with the disciplinary processes their schools have established to adjudicate sexual assault charges. Michelle Goldberg’s cover story in the Nation this week suggests a very different dynamic, one that survivors’ advocates say denies them real justice , and that students’ rights advocates say fails to meet the standards of a judicial process.

I suppose it is a kind of equality when survivors and the accused are equally dissatisfied, but that is not exactly a heartening response to Will’s claim.

It might be enough to enumerate the oddity of Will’s assumption about the benefits of being raped. But because Will scolds the Obama administration for repeating statistics about campus sexual assaults that do not seem to add up, it is worth noting that his idea of a “coveted status” has an implication that is not born out by data. If being a survivor is truly so valuable, then wouldn’t we have an epidemic students will make false reports of rape or attempt to transmute sexual encounters that they regret (he cites one example, as well as referring to hookup culture) into rape charges?


We do not.



And the idea of such an epidemic of false charges is not supported by research. As I wrote last week, most studies that balance the perspectives of survivors and law enforcement suggest that there is a false reporting rate of between two and eight percent.



So why does the idea of the false report persist?
Daniel Kahan, the Elizabeth K. Dollar Professor of Law at Yale Law School, who has written extensively on the phenomenon of “motivated reasoning,”that the way we weigh evidence is influenced by strong goals, needs and worldviews, studied the cultural norms that affected views of acquaintance and date rape cases. He found that attachment to traditional gender roles played a significant role in driving skepticism that survivors actually meant it when they said no to sex.

In particular, women who are highly invested in traditional gender norms tend to lean towards defendants’ accounts because of the idea that “saying ‘no’ but meaning ‘yes’ is conceived of by those who subscribe to gender norms as a strategy some women use to evade the stigma these norms visit on women who engage in casual sex,” Kahan wrote. “Women who have earned high group status by conspicuously conforming to these norms are the ones most threatened by the prospect that women who use this strategy will escape censure.”
When discussing sexual assault, this kind of “cultural cognition,” or assessment of the facts in accordance with the ideas that make up your worldview, makes a certain sort of tragic sense.

Distasteful as Will’s conclusions are, I suppose that, of two terrible options, it might be better to believe that young women have what Fox News recently termed “hateful little minds” than to believe that young men are raping young women in large numbers and that colleges are acting in such a way to keep sexual predators free. That former scenario is ugly. The latter is monstrous.

As Kahan puts it in his paper, “Cultural cognition is a form of identity self-defense.” When someone encounters a challenge to the conceptions that form their identity, “the cost of accepting such a claim oneself is likely to be dissonance as well as alienation from others whose support is essential to one’s material and psychic well-being. Consequences of the widespread acceptance of the claim by others are likely to include restrictions on behavior necessary to attain respect within one’s own community, and a diminishment of status for one’s group in society at large.”

George Will is not alone in finding discussion of sexual assault on college campuses disturbing — he at least acknowledges that the rate of attacks is “too high.” The current attempts to remedy campus sexual assault crises may be satisfactory to no one. But as colleges, universities, the Obama administration and the rest of us proceed with a conversation about how to make improvements, we might all do well to make the well-being of young people, rather than our own preexisting worldviews, a priority.

Post: #15

One of the comments under the Rosenberg articles:

Quote:8:07 PM PDT
If 20% of co-eds get raped in 4 years of college, than 5% of all co-eds are raped every year. At a 40,000 student college, that would 1,000 rapes of the 20,000 co-eds, or about 3 rapes every day all year long.

The entire 600,000 people in the District of Columbia, including Georgetown, UDC and all other colleges, only has 200 rapes per year, or less than one per day.

Post: #16

As you might expect, there is a MoveOn petition to get George Will fired from the Washington Post.

What's disturbing is that so far over 28,000 people have signed it. This is the New McCarthyism -- the left blacklisting writers and trying to silence them for being "incorrect."

Rather than post a link to the petition, I'm posting a link to where we can all email the "petition creators," Nina and Shaunna, who wish to remain anonymous yet have no problem trying to rob a man of his livelihood because they disagree with him. So-called progressives have become unbearable.

http://petitions.moveon.org/contact_crea...n_id=75566

Post: #17

(06-10-2014 10:38 PM)Dusty Wrote:  It might be enough to enumerate the oddity of Will’s assumption about the benefits of being raped.

Jesus Christ, these people. Will wasn't saying it cool to be raped. He was saying it's cool to be known as a rape survivor. And thus that there are certain incentives toward defining rape down, and redefining a night of bad or regretted sex as rape. That was one of his major points, and she either didn't understand it, or, worse, is pretending not to understand it.

Post: #18

(06-10-2014 11:05 PM)Days of Broken Arrows Wrote:  As you might expect, there is a MoveOn petition to get George Will fired from the Washington Post.

What's disturbing is that so far over 28,000 people have signed it. This is the New McCarthyism -- the left blacklisting writers and trying to silence them for being "incorrect."

Rather than post a link to the petition, I'm posting a link to where we can all email the "petition creators," Nina and Shaunna, who wish to remain anonymous yet have no problem trying to rob a man of his livelihood because they disagree with him. So-called progressives have become unbearable.

http://petitions.moveon.org/contact_crea...n_id=75566

Women's Group Garners 87,000 Signatures Urging WAPO to Fire George Will

Leftists hate the First Amendment almost as much as they hate the Second. Freedom of speech is only for them, and guns are only for their beloved government.

Post: #19

Another harpy response:

http://www.laweekly.com/informer/2014/06...-privilege

Best line from above article:

Quote:This week, conservative columnist George Will posited in the Washington Post that victims of sexual assaults are given "a coveted status that confers privileges," and that because of that, their numbers at colleges and universities are "proliferating."

Victims and non-victims alike were outraged by the suggestion. On Twitter, hashtag activist Wagatwe Wanjuki began using #SurvivorPrivilege to sarcastically remark just how "privileged" she and fellow survivors of sexual assault are.

Badalich shares that anger. "I was so frustrated when I saw [the Washington Post] article. I started tweeting about it like crazy."

Post: #20

George Will is completely right on this one. I hope the SJW's don't get his scalp.

I've been trying to decide what's worst. Feminism or PHP.

Post: #21

Post: #22

First paper drops Will over the piece:

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/06/...e-victims/

Post: #23

(06-16-2014 11:53 PM)2Wycked Wrote:  

Post: #24

(06-18-2014 09:03 PM)trian1 Wrote:  First paper drops Will over the piece

"Circulation for the St. Louis Dispatch dropped for the daily paper from 213,472 to 191,631 to 178,801 for the two years after 2010, ending on September 30, 2011 and September 30, 2012."

When your readership is falling faster than a shit filled balloon, claims that you're cancelling columnists because of content ring false. The reality is, you can't afford columnists. Because your newspaper sucks and no one is reading it anymore.

Post: #25

I think the line some use now is "one-third of all women will be rape victims in their lifetime."

If you look at the FBI statistics (from 2003), it's 0.5 rapes per 1000, or 1 rape per every 2000 people. Now, even if you accept that 95% of rapes aren't reported (which I think is an overestimation), that's still 1 rape per every hundred. Which makes 1% of all women victims, not 33.3% of all women victims.