Well... damn. There's some news for you.
Assuming latest reports are true (and given the twists and turns of this affair, that's an important hedge) it looks as though the DSK case may collapse shortly. Current reporting is sketchy, and it's unclear how much evidence about Monsieur Strauss-Kahn's accuser simply undermines her general credibility as a witness and how much undermines the veracity of her specific story (as an aside, seriously, who doesn't know they're being recorded when talking on prison phones? I was empaneled on a felony trial once and the stupidly-incriminating stuff people say in such circumstances is mind-boggling), but it looks like DSK might not be quite the sociopath he initially appeared to be. Might still be (evidence of a sexual encounter is apparently "unambiguous," the notion of it being consensual still seems a bit off to me, and the accumulated evidence that he treats women terribly in general seems beyond contest), but might not. I only mention this because I wrote at the time that Strauss-Kahn was "entitled to legal presumption of innocence and a public that's willing, within reason, to reserve final judgment." So this is me doing that. If he really didn't rape this woman, well, that's awful and he's owed an apology. Also sucks for the French Left, but therein lies the danger of putting all one's eggs in the same basket.
As far as I'm concerned, though, the main point of my post - that Bernard-Henri Levi was being a rape apologist asshat and should have been ashamed of himself - doesn't change one iota. Levi was working off the same public reports as everyone else, and his reaction was to hysterically search for reasons why this was everyone's fault but DSK's. That's an attitude that needs to be challenged, and I remain happy to have joined the chorus of people justly calling him out.
Brief Update: To the question of whether any of these new revelations are actually relevant to the incident in question, rather than just the Jury-friendliness of the accuser, the answer seems to be "sort of." This is the letter from the DA outlining some of the problems. The fact that she cleaned a couple of rooms after the incident, rather than immediately reporting it as originally claimed, raises some plausibility issues; but again, given that sexual contact is basically uncontested, these should be weighed against the plausibility of a hotel maid walking into a room, seeing a sixty-something paunchy stranger in a towel, and saying to herself, "hey, you know what I'm just dying to do right now?..."
In any case, barring more twists it seems likely that DSK will be on his way back to France a free man before too long. I hope at a public level their remains some pressure to explain and account for his behavior. I'm not terribly optimistic. And Bernard-Henri Levi is still a dick.
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ReplyDeleteIn my capacity as moderator I have deleted the two previous comments due to their crossing a line between retrograde thinking (which I find an annoying but ultimately unavoidable part of any debate) and hard bigotry (which I will not tolerate on this site). For the record, asserting an immutable relationship between ethnoreligous background and criminality is bigoted. If you must express such thoughts, do so elsewhere.
ReplyDeletethank you for your response.
ReplyDeleteam not sure whether my crime was "hard bigotry" or "retrograde thinking" -- which is probably defined as an idea that returns us to a previous level of understanding or blocks "progress." if the latter part of the definition reminds you of orwell, you see my point: "progress" can be retrograde. for example, the leftist christopher lasch rightly spoke of certain behavivors as "regression masking as liberation."
the issue in the context of DSK is irony.
you are in flight from seeing relationships that are not happenstance, but are organic extensions of culture and of what those cultures teach, in particular what they teach about other cultures. and so you force a high-falutin', abstract way of speaking, so as not to offend.
in this way, progressive thought becomes progressively restrictive.
the other day, i read an analysis that the source of this kind of confusion is a faulty interpretation of the Holocaust. If man is not inherently evil, there must be an explanation... what could it be?
The thing that must be stopped, is "bigotry"-- that is, making distinctions on grounds that give the hearer even the slightest smell of the gas chambers.
So we must not speak of cultural or racial distinctions and their implications for public policy, because they have none.
And then, progressivism becomes totalitarian. Do not speak any words that seem to be retrograde, but shout them down when they come from outside.
for example: "men are inherently evil, but are made better by cultures that mix tenderness and firmness. and the cultures that fail in this matter tend to give rise to individuals who... " shh.
The statistics described here are said to be from the State Bureau of Statistics, in Denmark:
ReplyDeletehttp://hodja.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/crime_stat_3.png?w=300
The gloss is from a Danish author:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/06/new-york-times-ridiculous-lie-immigrant-crime-not-visible-in-statistics.html
People in western nations do well not to censor information that is relevant to policy decisions. The reason is this: the rules of free speech are protective.
To assert that the specifics of culture --- teachings and mores ---have an effect on prosperity and public safety is to tell a truth. And to assert that different immigrant cultures have differential effects on the public safety of host cultures is not to say that there are no good apples.
The main question is not the protection of the good apples, but the protection of the host cultures.