Michael Moynihan: Why We Must Confront Uncomfortable Questions About the UVA Rape Case

   This is well worth a read, especially for the roundup of quotes from True Believers about why questioning the Rolling Stone account is verboten.
   Don't miss e.g. our old friend Amanda Marcotte's contribution: “it’s really time for people to understand that rape denialism is like Holocaust denialism: a broad refusal to face reality.” Huhwha? Is someone out there denying that rape happens? Or is the idea that Jackie's anonymous account in Rolling Stone should be accorded the same evidential weight as the mountains of physical, photographic, and eyewitness evidence that we have for the Holocaust? (Moynihan's question, really, not mine.)
   And then there's this tidbit I'd almost forgotten about, from Catherine Comins, a dean at Vassar:

Back in the 1990s, a dean at Vassar College told Time magazine that a false accusation is not only an acceptable price to pay, but might even benefit the falsely accused: “[The wrongly accused] have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. ‘How do I see women?’ ‘If I didn’t violate her, could I have?’ ‘Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?’ Those are good questions.”

   The mind, it reels and reels and reels...
   (Some of the comments are also amazing, even by the standards of interweb comments on this topic. My favorite: the fact that none of the accused (and possibly fictional) rapists have come forward to deny that they are guilty shows that the account is true... )