No serious feminist, however, would cavalierly dismiss the data collected by the Children's Bureau, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and so on by saying that they are "gibberish," for feminists often rely on their data for their research (as you would know if you took interest in feminist research), just as economists on the Left make use of the data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and so on.
> I see also that you are unwilling to engage with my notion
> that blacks reporting atrocities against them under slavery should be
> assumed to be falsifying in the absence of corroborating witnesses and if
> they base their accounts on memory. Come on, Yoshie, give it a try; I'm sure
> you can construct an argument to disallow black testimony on such subjects.
Historians would weigh all relevant available sources, among which are voices of slaves. We know about atrocities in the past, not only chattel slavery but even older events for which direct testimonies of victims are entirely unavailable (as is often the case with the examination of the past before the rise of mass literacy and modern collection of testimonies of ordinary people). There can be many kinds of evidence, from demographic estimates, material artifacts, to documents left by victimizers who didn't perceive what they were doing as wrong and recorded it, even when victims left few or no document of their own.
> Yoshie, suppose I offered you some figures on how often Americans shit, and
> the volume of shit produced. I guess your first response would be to dismiss
> answers that weren't corroborated by one or more witnesses a la rape in
> Pakistan.
You've yet to answer if it's all right to convict you of rape, sexual harassment, etc. on basis of "recovered memory" of a woman alone.
I believe that the interests of actual and potential crime victims, be they of rape or terrorism or any other crime, must be balanced with the interests of maintaining safeguards for civil liberties. Don't you? -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>