Start again. You are already begging the question in your first sentence. You don't know if a complainant is a victim until you've established they are a victim.
Also, belief is not something you can will yourself in to.
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Start again. You are already begging the question in your first sentence. You don't know if a complainant is a victim until you've established they are a victim.
Also, belief is not something you can will yourself in to.
Arctish
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Also, "believe" has more than one meaning, so if you run into a person who thinks it means "unquestioning acceptance of the inerrancy of an allegation", brace yourself for a long and tedious discussion. Don't use verbal shortcuts. Be wordy. Like this:
Also, remember to use non-gendered nouns whenever possible.
Here's one: take allegations seriously. It requires no instruction for people to magickally will themselves to believe something, which is an impossible task.
Don't use the term "believe". The people who use it themselves don't believe it.
fromderinside
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So does taking allegations seriously include evaluating them against already known and oft reported behavioral tendencies of the culprit?
Good.
Your turn: how do you take her allegation seriously when it is released when she is in an opposition group twenty-seven years after the alleged event.
I'll give points if the mother information is validated.
However his behavior other than this one alleged event remains as buttress against the validity of the allegation.
Notice no 'believe'.
Good.
Your turn: how do you take her allegation seriously when it is released when she is in an opposition group twenty-seven years after the alleged event.
I'll give points if the mother information is validated.
However his behavior other than this one alleged event remains as buttress against the validity of the allegation.
Notice no 'believe'.
Arctish
Centimillionaire
I have never met anyone who thinks "believe" has only one meaning, and that meaning is "magickally will themselves to accept something about something". Perhaps that's the connotation in Australia, but here in the US "believe" can mean both the unquestioning acceptance of the truth and accuracy of a story or report or allegation, and a provisional acceptance of it's truth and accuracy.
I believe my boss gave me true and accurate information regarding my vacation pay, the neighborhood mail carrier is faithfully delivering the mail, and that Merrill hiking shoes are a good value. I fully acknowledge my boss might be mistaken, the mail carrier might be a slacker, and Merrill hiking shoes might be a rip-off. These are not contradictory statements.
As to the phrase "believe women", I rarely encounter it. The only time I've ever discussed it was here. I seems to me it's closely tied to discussions in which people, usually blatant misogynists, are or have been casting aspersions on the truthfulness of women and the reliability of their reports. I don't think I've ever encountered it apart from that particular precondition. So it's natural for people, especially Feminists like me, to argue in favor of believing women even when they mean provisionally accepting the truthfulness and sincerity of anyone making such a report and the importance of investigating their allegations.
I've found it's best to explicitly include men in the category "self-identified victims of sexual assault" just to cut down on the pointless bickering. And to be wordy.
Really, really wordy.
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And what if you didn't believe it? You can't choose whether you believe it or not.
You can believe things and be mistaken. I'm saying you can't will yourself into believing.
Feminists use the term all the time. Follow some feminists on twitter. It's a stupid term and the people that use it are hypocrites or delusional.
Also, not only can you not control whether you believe something, it is meaningless to ask people to 'provisionally accept the truthfulness' of statements. Nobody is obligated to 'provisionally accept the truthfulness' of statements. In any case, it can't be applied to everyone. If Y alleges an abuse perpetrated by X, and X denies it, there is some truth about the situation. Both statements cannot be true. You cannot accept both Y's statement and X's statement as 'provisionally true' because one of them must be false.
Arctish
Centimillionaire
I do not believe unquestioningly. My belief is provisional. My belief leaves room for doubt. That's what I'm getting at here. "Believe" has more than one meaning.
If someone says they believe something, they might mean they accept it unquestioningly or they might mean they're not entire certain it's true but for now they accept it as true.
Trying to make all instances of the use of the word "believe" fit a single definition is like trying to make a Phillips head screwdriver work with all screws. It doesn't work.
That is incorrect when the people being asked to 'provisionally accept the truthfulness' of statements are police officers and the statements are reports of criminal activity. It is not meaningless, it's essential that they provisionally accept as true the statements of a self-identified victim and/or alleged witness and/or alleged informant, tipster, gossip-monger, and/or person allegedly in-the-know about an alleged incident, and to provisionally accept as true that they are truthfully reporting what they genuinely believe happened.
Egads, this is getting wordy.
I can provisionally accept that Al genuinely and sincerely believes Bert raped him. I can also provisionally accept that Bert genuinely and sincerely believes that the sexual contact he had with Al was consensual. I don't have to simply accept that one of the claims is objectively true and accurate. They might both be mistaken or exaggerating or lying or seeing the same thing from two very different perspectives and with two very different worldviews.
The police must provisionally accept that something deserving of an investigation happened before they will investigate it. That's where all too many police departments failed all too many rape victims. The reports of self-identified victims were ignored, discounted, and/or prejudged as without merit rather than being duly investigated. That's the pattern people are seeking to change when they talk about believing victims. They just need to avoid gendered nouns and be really wordy when they say it so that others don't get too cranked up over phraseology.
laughing dog
Contributor
This is blatantly untrue because belief also means "trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something". Perhaps the issue here is your unfamiliarity with the nuances of the English language.
You can't will yourself into those states, either.
Perhaps the issue here is your unfamiliarity with human cognitions.
Jimmy Higgins
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You are unfamiliar with "willful ignorance" and "cults" I see. People will themselves into believing all sorts of things. Obfuscation? That is a political art. People will themselves into so many beliefs.
Yet Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity pay their listeners nothing, but they'll believe that the economy in 2016 in the US was worse than in 2008, which wasn't just wrong but almost comically incorrect.
Toni
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Perhaps the issue here is that you are unfamiliar with human cognition.
Perhaps you cannot will yourself into a state of believe--or believe that you do not, but the fact is that people do choose to believe all sorts of things. The presence of religion should be sufficient example. Or one partner chooses to believe the other when they are told that the partner was working late, was faithful, that it didn't mean a thing. Or that the check is in the mail. I'll do it next Thursday. All sorts of things. Or that this candidate is more likely to do a good job serving in their chosen office and representing viewpoints that I agree with. People choose to believe all sorts of things are true, even in the face of plain evidence to the contrary. Very obvious case in point: Trump supporters/anything at all that Trump says.
A victim is traumatized. Trauma can do all sorts of things: it can change emotional affect by increasing it--or by making it very flat. It can cause lapses in judgment, lapses in memory, altered perception, fragmented memory, heightened sense of fear or alarm and many others.
A person presents themselves as a victim. No matter how skeptical one is or has reason to be, if one is actually interested in the truth, the best course of action is to believe the victim---and then investigate the facts as best as can be done. If the victim is straight up maliciously lying, you are much more likely to get pertinent information and cooperation--and to get them to let enough guard down to ferret out the truth if your initial stance is belief. If the victim is traumatized to any extent at all, belief in their statement allows them to trust themselves and investigators enough to aid investigation rather than hinder it. Even if the account is highly unlikely, it almost certainly contains some elements of truth. The only way to get at the truth is to (initially) take the account at face value. A drunk claims that Michael Jackson mugged them in an alley. Obviously that's untrue: Jackson is dead. One could either dismiss the drunk as a lying drunk--or investigate, believing that something happened involving Michael Jackson--and discover that there was a Michael Jackson impersonator performing that night and indeed, they went into the alley between sets and rolled the drunk and went back on to perform their next set after their costume change. But if you start with: lying drunk, you never find out anything.
laughing dog
Contributor
Of course you can will yourself into trust or confidence. People do it all the time.
Maybe, but clearly I am not as unfamiliar as your posts seem to make you appear.
Koyaanisqatsi
Veteran Member
And what would be the very first step in that investigatory process?
You go to your police station and tell an officer that you were just mugged by Jerry Lewis. Now, since Jerry Lewis is dead, what must the officer do--mentally--in order to investigate your crime? He must....come on....you can type it....provisionally believe that something happened to you to make you think that you were just mugged by Jerry Lewis.
Iow, he must provisionally believe (1) that something traumatic did in fact happen to you and that, (2) at least you believe you were mugged by Jerry Lewis.
What the cop believes actually may have happened--that, more likely it was someone who looked like Jerry Lewis or that you were so traumatized by the incident that you mistakenly thought it was Jerry Lewis, etc.--is a separate issue, unless and until upon hearing you say it was "Jerry Lewis" he did not provisionally believe you for the sake of investigation. He instead dismissed you out of hand--and called you a "nutso"--and told you to get out of the station, "we have more important things to do" etc.
THAT is the issue the "believe women" movement is trying to address; the fact that all too often women (and men) who were raped can't even get beyond the very first step in the investigative process, because the cops dismiss their accusations a priori. Iow, they do not believe the story being told to them and do not move forward with an investigation to actually find out the truth one way or the other.
Yes, it is.
No, it actually doesn't, you just evidently don't comprehend the concept of provisional beliefs. As your own source illustrates:
I'll repeat the salient part you evidently missed: during the period while they endeavored to prove or disprove the accusation.
That is not a counter argument.
Koyaanisqatsi
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Well, it's definitely ironic, just not in the way you're thinking.
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This seems like needlessly complicated semantic nitpicking. When a person files a police report alleging that that they were the victim of a crime, they are generally referred to as the victim throughout the proceedings. Only in cases where their claim is proved to be false (either through fraud or mistake) are they no longer referred to as the victim. The person accused of the crime should properly be referred to as the alleged perpetrator until such time as they are convicted of the crime.
If you call the cops and say that you were robbed, you should expect to be referred to as the victim of a robbery unless the cops end up proving that you made it all up and were never robbed int he first place. And I'm relatively confident that if you called the cops and reported that you were robbed, you'd be pretty affronted if they insisted that they needed to investigate you to determine whether or not you were telling the truth before they started investigating the robbery itself.
Emily Lake
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If you call the cops and report that you have been robbed, do you expect the police to believe you?
Emily Lake
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In any crime that is reported, it is expected that the person reporting the crime is to be believed. That's what opens the investigation in the first place.
The cops do not investigate whether or not you were really robbed or whether you're making it up. They don't investigate whether your dead spouse is actually for realsies dead before they start investigating the murder.
It seems that you and Metaphor feel that in the specific case of rape, the person who reports a crime against themselves should be investigated first, in order to determine whether or not a crime has been committed in the first place... and only after having conclusively shown that they were raped, then begin an investigation into the alleged perpetrator.
Why do you want this specific crime to be treated differently from all others?
Koyaanisqatsi
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In short, the sophistry being regurgitated itt is: You have to prove that were raped, before the police will prove that you were raped.
Toni
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Normally, if a murder investigation is begun, a body exists and an autopsy indicates the cause of death consistent with potential homicide.
A person is discovered in a back yard and is dead from a broken neck. A murder investigation takes place if it is determined that the cause of the broken neck is potentially due to homicide. Even if the person is discovered dead from a broken neck with half of a rope tied into a noose around their neck and the other half tied to a tree branch, and a suicide note present, there is an investigation to determine whether the death was actually a result of suicide or whether there was something else going on.
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
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Lynda LaCasse, former neighbor of Tara Reade, came forward and corroborated that in the mid-1990's Tara told her about the sexual assault.
https://www.businessinsider.com/former-neighbor-corroborates-joe-bidens-accuser-2020-4
https://www.businessinsider.com/former-neighbor-corroborates-joe-bidens-accuser-2020-4