I wonder if there will be a media frenzy over her.

Betsy Newmark has a lengthy post on the background of Duke Lacrosse accuser Crystal Gail Mangum and wonders:Since when is the penalty for stealing a car, drunken driving, and trying to run down a police deputy just two weekends in……

For those who tried to demonize the Duke Lacrosse players and paint them as privileged rich white males in whose favor the ’system’ was rigged, I suggest that they look back to 1991 when a certain William Kennedy Smith, nephew to Teddy Kennedy, was accused of rape.

The vicitm’s name, a Ms. Patricia Bowman, was given to the media early on. Indeed, she had been tried by media long before young Master Smith was tried before a court of law. The media were relentless and the prosecution inept in comparison to the Kennedy furnished attorney Roy Black. Rules were broken and standard procedure not followed. That was a casebook study of how the privileged get special treatment.

Though he keeps a low Mr. Smith has been accused of sexual assault several times since, not a peep in the media. Indeed his uncle, Senator Kennedy has a long trail of allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, which if he had been a conservative republican, would have been more than sufficient to have driven him from the senate long ago and possibly to prison.

I won’t even venture onto Clinton’s history, or Senator Dodd’s or Gary Studd’s.

We all know who the real privileged elite are and that the media treats them with kid gloves.

While the players are not angels and in all probability loutish frat-boys, they didn’t deserve to be looking at up to 30 years in prison. They were to be made a sacrifice on the altar of political correctness and race/class warfare. Not to mention partisan politics. First, by an up for election prosecutor, then by the leftist progressives who wished to make these young men by inference, an implicit indictment of conservatives in general and republicans in specific. Much like Imus is now a ‘conservative.’

Most of the mainstream media was only too glad to lend a hand in their lynching.

Indeed, what will be interesting is how many in the media, or the Duke faculty group of 88 will ever even admit that they possibly might have been mistaken, let alone apologize.

It is said that in war, truth is the first casualty. In this skirmish in the ongoing culture war, I would venture to say that right after truth, simple human decency took the next hit.

Why not? At Brigham Young University, they still have unisex dorms and rules against being in the bedroom of the opposite sex. The rules aren’t always kept, but because they’re there, you can still tell someone “no” and have the force of “law” behind it.

It’s been that way for decades, and no one is proposing chadors, purdahs, or duennas. The slope isn’t slipping at all in that direction.

Oh, and why is prison rape still a matter for comedy sketches and idle political threats?

Those fighting against human progress using revolutionary, anarchic, religious, or political means are trying to hold humans back. That is not a good thing, Neo. The duke case is only one minor consequence of holding humanity back from our potential. That’s why evil is evil. It seeks to weaken us, to hold us back, to stunt our potential, and glorify self-destruction.

And your “We can’t go back” conclusion symbolizes our largest societal problem: accepting error and erroneous outcomes as fait accompli. Recall the classic Edmund Burke statement on the triumph of Evil. When we are manifestly and obviously wrong we must “Go back”. The Left NEVER does that; it always forces the foot to fit the wrong shoe it produced!

That’s because the Left wants maximum entropy. Please go google Second Law of Thermodynamics if you don’t get what that means.

Entropy only goes in one direction, which is the direction time’s arrow flies. It don’t go back.

Neo has a thoughtful-as-usual essay….

In fact, we _did_ see a mini-shift away from promiscuity for a while during the height of the AIDS epidemic. The current wave of “outrageous” behavior at colleges and among young singles still falls well short of the excesses of the 1970s.

Discouraging dangerous behavior would require parents to take a strong stand, institutions to do likewise (and _not_ impose their views instead of the parents’), and law to back them up. These are achievable, but people have to _want_ to achieve them, rather than just wishing for someone to wave a magic wand.

And yet human history is not constant movement from moral to amoral. We have had movements in both directions–towards more strict morality and away from it–over time. I don’t think it’s impossible that some future American age might have institutions more adherent to a moral code.

Cultural power seems to be in the hands of the very young right now, who are inclined to explore and think rules established by 10,000 years of human history are only there to get in the way of their having fun.

If cultural power in the US were in the hands of an older crowd, we might see a more systemically conservative attitude to things like male and female dorms–more similar to the way they were in your youth.

A few good lawsuits could have a similar effect. Universities tend to bend whichever way the litigous wind blows

The direction of time’s arrow really doesn’t have much to do with recognizing when you’ve entered a blind alley — the only route out of such a situation is back. That doesn’t mean trying to reproduce some mythical “golden age” of the past — it simply means recognizing that some supposedly “progressive” ideas in fact aren’t.

What you do with that recognition varies. In some cases, the remedy might be simply to reverse the changes; in others — and I think this situation is one of these — it might be enough to undo some of the worst aspects of the change and improve upon other aspects. Extending the “rape shield” to include both accuser and accused until the legal system can pronounce its verdict would be one such improvement.

the only route out of such a situation is back.

Spacial orientation is not the same as time orientation. That’s space-time are two distnct quantities, or qualities.

When people coming from spatial perspectives interface with those coming from time perspectives, it becomes a semantic problem.

I remember when Neo wrote some posts about nostalgia. I got the sense that Neo wanted to bring the best that was in the past, and bring it forth to the future without dragging all the negatives along with it. She described nostalgia as one trick the human mind plays on itself in attempting to acquire such a state. But the actual ability to learn from history and improve upon the human condition, doesn’t use nostalgia, because going back to Neo is not a solution. And it is not a solution because nobody wants to go back, nobody should want to go back to being a child. Instead, people should grow up, if the had or have problems, they need to mature and grow as they deal with these problems. In the now and the future, rather than the past and the forgotten.

Here is a post people might be interested in, if they like me are fascinated with the Fall of the Roman Empire and how that relates to the American Imperium.

Do we want to go back to Ancient Roman Times? No. Can we go back even if we wanted to? No to that as well.

Fall of Empires

A lot of people want to go back to Golden Times and there are arguments about how to best do that. But in the Physics-Philosophical-Metaphysical sense, all I’m saying is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics weighs in pretty heavily concerning whether you can go back in time or not. Real heavy.

One of the reasons we know which direct time is going is because of entropy. If entropy is increasing, then we know time is going forwards. If entropy is DECREASING in a closed system, then we know time is going backwards. Otherwise, we get into trouble.

I conclude that this is either a caricature of the conservative position or the position of a miniscule minority.

But I suspect that you are idealizing, Ron, and that a little careful investigation of any of these past times that you think are better than today would make you change your mind. Note, I’m not saying that past times were uniformly worse than today, just that they weren’t, overall, better.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The political movement of fiery Iraqi Shi’ite cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr said on Sunday it would withdraw from the government on Monday to press its demand for a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal.

However, if there’s a stigma attached to being the victim of rape, there’s a thousand times more attached to being a rapist. Even in cases where the accused aren’t tried in the media the way these have been, the mere accusation can get you ostracized for life, cause you problems finding a job, getting the trust of a girlfriend’s or fiancee’s family, and so on. (Particularly now. Google never forgets such an accusation.)

There will always be people who say “Well, he was acquitted but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.” People are saying such things now about the Duke 3, despite the fact that the NC Attorney General has declared their complete and proven innocence, in so many words. Even in this comment thread we have people calling them “loutish frat boys” with the implication that they did something wrong, or violent, or something. They’ll never be out from under this accusation, or the concurrent insinuations such as the one mentioned earlier, and the taint will do much more harm in their lives than is done to any woman by public knowledge of her rape.

So why don’t the media also protect accused, in cases such as rape or child abuse, until such time as they’re convicted? My cynical answer is that they’d sell less broadcast time and fewer papers. Certainly the lurid Newsweek cover story of last year - “Sex, Lies, and Duke” - made quite a bit of money. Likewise the TV pundits have benefited greatly - I speak of financial benefit.

But is there any principled reason to hold the name of an accuser confidential because of the damage revealing it might do, while feeling no inhibitions over doing far greater damage by trumpeting the name of the accused in conjunction with the word “rapist”?

The Universe is a closed system, Tom. Technically, there could be a Higher Power called God by mortals, that could be feeding stars energy so they won’t go supernova or reversing time and decay, but I don’t think that’s something mortals should count on in their dealings with time and entropy.

Entropy occurs everywhere, not just in isolated and closed systems. To make things short, the Second Law of Thermodynamics state that for any closed system that is isolated from other systems with energy, entropy is either increasing or staying constant. It’s a trick proposition if you think about what occurs to a system in which entropy is decreasing, in which the energy that is causing this decrease in entropy is being provided by another system. What happens to the entropy in that system if it is contributing energy to the first the system? You could end up with a situation in which you talk about two systems both with access to each other, with one system decreasing in entropy, and the other system decreasing in entropy as well by shunting off its heat from one region to System 1. This might be called a perpetual motion machine, which shouldn’t exist. Actually, it doesn’t exist, but should exist since it would be a nice thing to have.

In the end, the only way Tom could be why that I’m incorrect about my application the Second Law of Thermodynamics is if he says that God is able to turn back the clock, resurrect people from the dead, and so forth.

Obviously if you believe there’s some open source energy avaiable to do work, any application of the Second Law to state that we are operating under a closed system, would be disbelieved. But this becomes a religious debate. Not a discussion on the Laws of Thermodyanmics. That is an important point to make.

If people want to talk about God, they’re free to do so, Tom.

So why don’t the media also protect accused, in cases such as rape or child abuse, until such time as they’re convicted?

I think this has to do with that law people discussed about laws concerning whether a man should pay child support for a child he didn’t want, as opposed to a woman who could abort a child she didn’t want and therefore not pay any support. The law was definitely applied unfairly, and Neo made the point that it was to protect the child. But then again, there are other laws that specifically don’t protect the child, but protects the right for mothers to kill their future children. So it was an interesting argument.

The Law of Gravity weighs in pretty heavily concerning whether I can float around at will. Real heavy. And?

It seems, Ymarsakar, you have mistaken two very different concepts. You seem to have mixed up the idea of traveling back in time with the concept of implementing and enforcing social or legal rules that were in force in the past but are no longer in force.

This is a little like mixing up the ideas of the law of conservation of mass with the concept of there being no free lunch. That is, the two could be mistaken if and only if your grasp on the English language were very tenuous, or you were very stupid, or if you only barely understood the conversation and the topics, as a child might confuse the conversation of parents, and you wanted desperately to sound like you knew what you were talking about. I’m going to guess that last one, but it’s just a guess. Maybe English is your third language?

What a delightful concept! How else might we know? Has someone checked today’s entropy levels against yesterday’s, to make sure that we’re still moving forward in time and not hurtling backwards through time?

Security will take care of your expenses when you retire or that what’s left over once you pay the bills is yours to spend freely. It’s your…