[lbo-talk] Child Sexual Abuse Statistics and Trends (wasApthekerallegations)

Jesse Lemisch utopia1 at attglobal.net
Sun Oct 22 13:47:14 PDT 2006


I see that Yoshie has conceded, albeit ungraciously, that the first set of statistics she presented in favor of her case, in all their concrete specificity, were a scam, a shuck and a jive. Now she repeats it with a claim that her authorities know what proportion of sex crimes committed are actually reported. Again, this involves fictitious concretizing in numbers of what is in fact unknown. And then this snottiness:


> If you claim to have more reliable data than the Children's Bureau and
> the Bureau of Justice Statistics, however, you might present them to
> us and explain why your data are more reliable than theirs.

I don't, you don't and they don't.

Finally a preposterous and literally red-baiting connection: Utterly ignoring the sexual political context in which sex crimes take place, she equates with Stalinism a tendency to be open to female accusations of sex crime. Again, a reasonable analogy would be with atrocities committed against blacks under slavery (and since). Obviously some would be disputable, but just as obviously anybody understanding the racial and political context in which they take place would presumably start with serious consideration of such accounts.

Of course, Yoshie will come back with Tawana Brawley, as if that case negated the enormous numbers of others which are part of US history.

Is this what socialist feminism is about? Could be.

Jesse Lemisch

But it
> seems to me that your belief about child sexual abuse is based on your
> impressions from the mass media, folk beliefs, and so on rather than
> research, leading to your blind faith in Bettina Aptheker's
> accusation. I say that it is blind faith because you seem to believe
> it based on her account alone and nothing would shake your belief in
> it.
>
> Of course, paranoid styles of law and order politics encourage us to
> disregard all available facts and trends and put blind faith in one's
> feverish imagination based on what the mass media market or what
> political leaders instruct us to believe. But when the public
> succumbs to paranoid styles, as too many Soviets under Stalin did and
> too many Americans have in recent decades, the nation gets burdened
> with fewer and fewer rights and liberties and a higher and higher
> incarceration rate.
>
> But do you really want to live in a place where accusation equals
> guilt? Because you think that such a principle will never be applied
> to you?
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



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