Continued: (Ed) Atheism Plus/Free Thought Blogs (FTB)

d4m10n said:
Yes.
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I had to click around for quite a while from what you linked to in order to find what I assume you were referring to. For future reference that is widely taken as a red flag, when someone presents something purporting to be a link to evidence which in fact isn't.

It seems to me that the accused has elaborated slightly on her story to try to bolster it, and claimed to have witnesses to support it, but they have not come forward. Shermer has told two different stories about the event, neither of which has been directly contradicted except by the accuser and the first of which could be either a dastardly lie or just a discreet fiction. Adding it all up, it's not much.

The anti-Shermer side seems to have been trying to bolster a weak collection of evidence by announcing that anyone who thinks their case isn't a slam-dunk must be an evil rape apologist, but as we all know ad hominem arguments are no substitute for evidence.

Taking everything together I think it's more likely than not that the accusation is true, but I don't think evidence exists to go any further than that.
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
It seems to me that the accused has elaborated slightly on her story to try to bolster it, and claimed to have witnesses to support it, but they have not come forward.
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The link should have taken you directly to Jeff Wagg supporting Alison Smith's account based on his own eyewitness account of events that fateful evening. If that did not happen, the link is working rather differently on your end than mine.

Kevin_Lowe said:
Taking everything together I think it's more likely than not that the accusation is true, but I don't think evidence exists to go any further than that.
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How much further does one need to go?
 
d4m10n said:
The link should have taken you directly to Jeff Wagg supporting Alison Smith's account based on his own eyewitness account of events that fateful evening.
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Jeff could only testify to the fact that she was drunk. I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise.
 
I actually know her pretty well, and there's no doubt in my mind that she's telling the truth.

I do find it amusing though that people's standards of evidence change depending on the topic :)
 
devnull said:
I actually know her pretty well, and there's no doubt in my mind that she's telling the truth.

I do find it amusing though that people's standards of evidence change depending on the topic :)
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We have this sort of social convention, which some people adhere to more than others, that allegations of criminal behaviour are for courts to decide in the first instance. The theory is that a court provides a fairer and more thorough search for truth than the average punter is capable of and hence we shouldn't make judgments about criminal culpability on our own.

Most people tend to see very clearly the risks of other people engaging in witch hunts and vigilantism, for good historical reasons, but at the same time think that it goes without saying that they personally are immune to such errors even when their emotions are running high. So it might be a good social rule in general to encourage people to leave criminal matters strictly to the courts.

On the other hand there is nothing fundamentally epistemologically special about claims of criminal behaviour compared to any other claims. They are true or false like any other and can be judged on the basis of evidence like any other.

So I can see why some people, with completely pure intentions, might say "this is nothing like proof beyond a reasonable doubt, this is just an unsupported accusation and a bunch of friends of the accuser saying they think the accuser is a trustworthy sort of person, we should not judge people on such flimsy grounds". Other could with equally pure intentions say "It's >50% the guy is a rapist, unleash the hounds of hell!". They might not even disagree about the evidence and how to assess it, just on the proper way to act on the conclusion reached.
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
So I can see why some people, with completely pure intentions, might say "this is nothing like proof beyond a reasonable doubt, this is just an unsupported accusation and a bunch of friends of the accuser saying they think the accuser is a trustworthy sort of person, we should not judge people on such flimsy grounds". Other could with equally pure intentions say "It's >50% the guy is a rapist, unleash the hounds of hell!". They might not even disagree about the evidence and how to assess it, just on the proper way to act on the conclusion reached.
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Or you guys could realise that there are several witnesses to her level of intoxication, several witnesses who say Shermer was feeding her alcohol while secreting his own (ewwww, that in itself is sooo shady), the fact that he followed her, and the fact that Shermer doesnt deny they had sex.
 
devnull said:
Right. In fact she was well drunk. Blotto. 3 sheets to the wind.

Shermer admits they had sex. How is having sex with someone who cannot consent not rape again?
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Ah but what does that mean. Legally that means to be sufficiently incapacitated by alcohol to not know what you are doing, not merely being to drunk to remember what you did. Alcohol and rape are complicated as people who are drunk are usually held accountable for their actions, and as alcohol lowers inhibitions causing behaviors that people would not normally do but are accountable for and messes with memory of their own actions it is hard to say definitively if something is rape. So by the legal definition of rape, it is entirely possible for someone to be black out drunk and have consentual sex and not know if what happened was rape or not, because they destroyed their memories of the event.

Or you have to define rape in such a way that it is considered possible for two people who rape each other because both of them are drunk enough for their actions to not count as consent.

So it is easy to label him as scum, rape is something that requires more evidence.
 
devnull said:
Or you guys could realise that there are several witnesses to her level of intoxication, several witnesses who say Shermer was feeding her alcohol while secreting his own (ewwww, that in itself is sooo shady), the fact that he followed her, and the fact that Shermer doesnt deny they had sex.
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And that is proof he is a scumbag. But the legal definition is still being incapacitated by alcohol not having diminished inhibitions.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
...except by each other.
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If I had a one night stand with person A, and then person B emailed me asking about what I did last night, it's not 100% certain that I'm going to think it's B's business and give them a full and detailed answer, especially if I haven't had a conversation with person A about whether they want me talking about it.

To my mind this is very much the flipped version of people saying "She invited him to talk on a panel, that's proof she was okay with it!". It's not proof of anything, it's compatible with either a criminal or non-criminal version of events.
 
devnull said:
Or you guys could realise that there are several witnesses to her level of intoxication, several witnesses who say Shermer was feeding her alcohol while secreting his own (ewwww, that in itself is sooo shady), the fact that he followed her, and the fact that Shermer doesnt deny they had sex.
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This isn't evidence that differentiates the two scenarios on the table. In both scenarios she was drunk, Shermer was watching his alcohol intake, they went back to his hotel room and there was sex. Everyone agrees on those parts of the story.

It's like saying "I say he went into the woods and killed that guy, and I've got four friends of mine who say he went into the woods!". Well, great, but going into the woods isn't a crime. We all agree he went into the woods, that's not being contested, we want evidence that speaks to whether he killed that guy.
 
devnull said:
Right. In fact she was well drunk. Blotto. 3 sheets to the wind.

Shermer admits they had sex. How is having sex with someone who cannot consent not rape again?
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Good question. Shermer had also been drinking. Surely you'll concede that she raped him as well.
 
devnull said:
Or you guys could realise that there are several witnesses to her level of intoxication...
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Name one other than Shermer or Smith who was at the party to witness her mental state prior to leaving.

We can conclude from what Wagg wrote that Smith was helplessly blotto by the end of the evening, but we'd have to make some assumptions about what happened behind closed doors in order to say that she was drunk the entire time. Specifically, we'd have to assume that Shermer made no efforts to get her any drunker than she already was, which runs against your "feeding her alcohol" narrative.

devnull said:
...several witnesses who say Shermer was feeding her alcohol while secreting his own...
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Name one who is not named Shermer or Smith, who was at the party to actually witness this happening.

It sounds to me like you are probably working from non-public information. So far as I've yet heard, no one who attended the Cigar, Wine and Scotch party has come forward to discuss how drunk anyone was when they left that room.
 
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Squeegee Beckenheim said:
...except by each other.
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Did they actually contradict each other directly? If so, it should be easy to paste in a couple of snippets to show where that happened. From what I could see, the original story was a sort of non-denial denial, which didn't state facts so much as imply them. "She's a good kid" isn't quite the same as "I would never seduce her" after all, it just feels like the former ought to imply the latter.
 
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