� Hmmmmm... | Main | AoSHQ Podcast: Clearing The Decks � Wikipedia Bans Five Social Justice Warriors From Editing Gamergate Articles, or Any Articles Having to Do With Gender or Sexuality, Broadly Defined They're the worst sort of parasite. A normal parasite comes in to get a free meal. You don't want that, of course, but you can survive a certain number of parasites. These parasites, however, come in with the express agenda of destroying the host. Wikipedia's arbitration committee, the highest user-run body on the site, has banned five editors from making corrections to articles about feminism, in an attempt to stop a long-running edit war over the entry on the "Gamergate controversy". The editors, who were all actively attempting to prevent the article from being rewritten with a pro-Gamergate slant, were sanctioned by "arbcom" in its preliminary decision. While that may change as it is finalised, the body, known as Wikipedia's supreme court, rarely reverses its decisions. The sanction bars the five editors from having anything to do with any articles covering Gamergate, but also from any other article about "gender or sexuality, broadly construed". ... In contrast, he says, "by my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance -- not only do the Gamergaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn's, Brianna Wu's, Anita Sarkeesian's, etc); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia." The Social Justice Warriors aren't merely toxic, vicious drama queens and borderline personality types looking to "split" other people; they're avowedly that, and consider this sort of ugly disruption to be a kind of high calling. Don't believe me? Read this. Meanwhile, Christine Hoff Summers traces the current fake, made-up "Rape Culture" disruption -- just a ploy to achieve disruption; not a real epidemic -- to 2010, when, get this, NPR conspired to cook up an SJW storyline. And it all began in 2010. That year, reporters at National Public Radio teamed up with the left-leaning journalism organization Center for Public Integrity (CPI) to produce and promote a 104-page "investigative reporting series" (PDF) entitled "Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice." (Full disclosure: The Daily Beast is an occasional publishing partner of CPI's.) ... On the evening of April 4, 2004, according to the NPR/CPI version of events, [Laura] Dunn, then a freshman and member of the crew team at the University of Wisconsin, consumed so many raspberry vodkas at a crew party that the student-bartenders refused her more drinks. She left with two young men she trusted from her team. They planned to go to another party, but decided to make a quick stop at one of the men's apartment. According to Dunn, once they arrived, her teammates raped her as she fell in and out of consciousness. For many months, she tried to dismiss the evening as a "just a mistake." Still, she couldn�t sleep, she lost weight, she dropped out of crew. Fifteen months later, Dunn attended a philosophy class where the professor was discussing how rape is a weapon of war. The professor suddenly stopped the lecture, turned to the students, and told them she knew many of her students had been raped, and she assured them they could do something about it. A tearful Laura Dunn told NPR�s Joseph Shapiro what happened next. "The moment that lecture let out," she said, "I walked across to the dean of students' office and I reported that day." She also reported the alleged rape to the campus police. The investigation did not go well for Dunn. Because she reported the assault nearly a year-and-a-half after the event, one of the men had already graduated. The other insisted the encounter had been consensual, and since there were no witnesses or evidence, both the police and the university dropped the case. This claimed violation was presented to the Department of Education as a violation of Title IX's federal guarantee that inequalities in treatment of women be resolved "equitably," and this in turn led Obama's SecEd to issue her "Dear Colleague" letter and to start putting the screws to men on campus. However, the story isn't quite as simple as Dunn, or Obama, or Kristen Gillibrand, would have you believe: The Dear Colleague letter created havoc, but before describing that havoc, let's check some facts. Dunn agreed to make her records public as a condition of being a part of the NPR/CPI investigation. The 18-page letter (PDF) she received from the OCR is publicly available. It gives a detailed summary of notes taken by University of Wisconsin deans as well as the local police detective. As freelance reporter Derek Rose has pointed out, it tells a very different story from the one we heard from Shapiro on NPR�s Morning Edition or from the CPI report. To wit: When Dunn first spoke to the dean (15 months after the alleged rape), she said that "a portion of the sexual encounter was consensual." (p.5) A few days later when she spoke to a campus police detective, Dunn said twice that she did not remember being raped by one of the men (the one still on campus). She found out about it only when the men told her what happened the next day (p.6). She also told the detective that in the months after the alleged rape that she went--twice--to one of the men's residence, where they engaged in consensual "physical contact." On one of these occasions both of the alleged assailants were at the apartment and they all watched television together. (p.6) None of these details were mentioned in the NPR/CPI report. The anomalies continue. The NPR/CPI team faulted the University of Wisconsin staff for dragging the case out for nine months�enough time for an �enraged encounter� (as related above) between the accuser and one of the accused men. According to the CPI team, when Dunn ran into the young man at a fraternity party, he stalked and threatened her. But Dunn told the police detective that she had initiated the encounter and when he walked away, she followed him into another room because she "knew he wanted to talk to her." She also admitted she had hugged him. No mention of threats. (p. 7). The young man�s version comports with the police report, but he adds that when Dunn approached him, he was alarmed, pulled away, and told her he was afraid she would fabricate more lies. When Dunn started to scream and cry, he fled. (p.8)

One does not need to come to a firm conclusion as to the merits of Dunn's charges to conclude this, rather easily: That whether Dunn was raped or not, this is hardly the sort of case where you'd expect a properly-functioning trier of fact to endorse her claims about the night in question. There are too many odd facts she admits (such as "touching" her alleged rapist "physically" in several post-"rape" encounters") to find cleanly for the complaining witness. Nevertheless, it is out of this nonsense case that the current Rape Panic was born.

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