Radshitzy Feminism, Police Investigative Technique: Identity Politics Deconstructing Law and Sense.

…  the Left is always hardest on its elderly: Chris Trotter, Brian Edwards, Rosemary McLeod, and Martyn Bradbury, all forced to limp bravely through their after-careers, the twitter-latte sniping at them down their noses from the high towers of the margins and the cafes.

Looking at New Zealand’s high profile criminal court failures, particularly murder trials - and there may well be another one coming with Mark Lundy - has any other amateur sleuth noted a problem with police investigative technique?

I assume a police investigation starts with an open mind to all the facts, but at some stage in the process a decision is made on charging a single suspect, and then for reasons unknown, perhaps something as inane as budgetary constraints, perhaps the way police career advancement is attained, the entire process narrows down to making the case against that person, and seemingly, nothing else. At that point, only the facts that bend toward the police line are included; facts, including new evidence, that prejudice their case are either put to the margin, or in some atrocious cases, tampered with or destroyed. What Peter Williams QC calls 'the striving for conviction'.

That investigative process needs total overhaul surely from a closed system to an open one. It has to remain receptive to all new facts, even those, no, especially those, that might go against the course of the enquiry. Investigation must be without prejudice and flexible enough to withdraw from an untenable, or even unlikely, position, and start again from a new matrix of data. And a deaf ear needs be turned to public opprobrium vis a vis accusations of time wasting, incompetence, or whatever on long enquiries: to the investigators only the truth must matter, politicisation of their function cannot be allowed to interfere, particularly by the Fortress of Legislation.

This blog post about the continued troubling uptake of a Left feminism, starting as it did from a personal prejudice, almost made the same mistake. Chasing the wrong approach despite the facts, even when I knew better. This was my original, imprudent opening:

If you put the words radical, bat-shit, and crazy together you get radshitzy. This post pertains to that small cool clique standing loudly atop a soapbox anonymously yelling their foul mouthed invective, in an otherwise sane and important debate on feminism, which I am heretofore going to call radshitzy feminism. Last week radshitzy feminism managed to storm the bastion of a necessarily dispassionate and gender/race/religion-blind rule of law by contending that women who make false rape complaints should not be prosecuted by police.

The ‘radshitzy’ creation was of course designed to be incendiary because it was born of that radshitzy form of feminism that did once reach out to touch me in the form of Thorny. Her anonymous hate site with its wall of scum continues still. But such an approach applied to the authors’ of a piece published last month would be a mistake, because I don’t believe either author has malice, per se, they are just rightly angry as hell about rape. Albeit the end point of what they wrote would be, even if unwittingly, evil. So let’s start again, navigating my way fearfully through the vicious battleground that is becoming the closed system of feminist discourse 2013; vicious because one such as myself must crawl on their belly across barbed wire to avoid the poison pill loaded bullets of mansplaining, privilege, and being a patronising git that have taken even some of New Zealand’s Left stalwarts off the field, because the Left is always hardest on its elderly: Chris Trotter, Brian Edwards, Rosemary McLeod, and Martyn Bradbury, all forced to limp bravely through their after-careers, the twitter-latte sniping at them down their noses from the high towers of the margins and the cafes. (Although did Martyn ever have a career?)

The contention that women who make false rape complaints should not be prosecuted by police was made in a co-authored piece published in The Guardian by Lisa Longstaff, spokesperson for UK group Women Against Rape, and Lisa Avalos, assistant professor of law at the University of Kansas. The paragraph in question comes at the end of the article, so I’ll start with it, then work backwards to the context and the intention of Lisa squared – squared, because in the language used by Lisa and Lisa, the notion of an individual human being has been dispensed with, which ultimately, is the problem:

But the prosecution of women for alleged false reports strengthens the myth that women frequently lie about being raped and discourages victims from coming forward. It diverts law enforcement away from thoroughly investigating rape and lets rapists loose on the public. It is not in the public interest, and must be stopped.

I don’t need to check my privilege – that is, impose a gagging order on myself – to say this is wrong on every level. Even if privilege is tortured from my words by the post moderns, I’d still rather speak my mind, thanks, because free speech is the very definition of freedom in just two words.

First, the face value argument put forward that police should never prosecute women who make false rape complaints, because a) that may discourage future rape complaints, and b) we can’t have police time wasted on serving justice over false, and one must assume, malicious, complaints. All police time should be devoted solely to catching rapists.

Taking each of the limbs separately, it is incontrovertible from the statistics given that a high level of rape goes without prosecution. That’s appalling. However the fix for that is greater resourcing of police, not to commit the further wrong of advocating freeing up police time by not prosecuting known crimes, such as the serious false allegation of rape. On this basis why not also free up police time for prosecuting rapists by not prosecuting the lesser misdemeanours of house burglaries or car thefts? Once you’ve made the decision to ignore one set of crimes to police a ‘greater’ crime, where do the police start drawing the line of what laws not to police? It's a mirror image of how many rights of each individual does the state abrogate in chasing the greater common good – (the answer to that is none, incidentally).

An extension of this argument was that Lisa squared quoted the cases of three woman falsely found guilty of making false claims, allowing their rapists to commit further rape crimes. Again, appalling, and bringing my post back to where it started: deeply flawed police processes. But such miscarriage of justice is not confined to the prosecution of rape complaints. Do the numerous instances of false verdicts in murder cases mean we don’t prosecute murder cases? Of course not, that would be absurd.

More worrisomely, Lisa squared in their report admit that the three false convictions cited would not have occurred if police had done their job correctly:

IACP guidelines were clearly not followed in the three cases above. In each, police decided early the woman had lied, disregarded physical evidence of the rape and investigated her rather than her rapist. They also put severe pressure on each woman to retract. DM and Patty did, and the police then used the retraction to charge them.

IACP guidelines also state that a report of sexual assault can only be considered false "if the evidence establishes that no crime was committed or attempted" and "only after a thorough investigation". If this one guideline had been followed, all three prosecutions would never have happened.

The authors identify this is again a matter of police resourcing and in the event, police deficiencies in the investigative process, perhaps even corruption, yet don’t choose the answer as addressing this, but the fantastical notion police should not prosecute woman making false rape complaints. Why was this? The answer to that is why Lisa squared are so important. I believe they are looking to deconstruct the very concept and operation of Western jurisprudence itself.

The contention women not be prosecuted for making false rape claims is anathema to the classical liberal foundation of Western jurisprudence. But that classical liberal position is itself the enemy of a feminism bound to, and bound by, collectivism. [Flak jacket on] My explanation following is not mansplaining to the associate law professor on the philosophy of the rule of law she is supposedly teaching, because that would involve me telling the professor what she already knows, which would appear to be nothing of consequence. Our Western rule of law cannot operate outside the central tenet of individual responsibility for one’s actions, and therefore taking the consequences of those actions. It’s the flip side of rights which similarly must only attach to individuals.

A just justice system has to be founded on acknowledgment of individuals as volitional actors responsible for their actions, and thus taking the consequences thereof. The only rightful defence against this being the plea of insanity. Furthermore, only on this basis can a legal system also seek to change an individual’s behaviour and rehabilitate them. Allowing a group arbitrarily consigned by gender, race, religion, et al, to be freed of the consequences of their behaviour, for any reason, turns a legal system into a mechanism for vendetta and politicking, as well as denying the possibility of rehabilitating an individual’s criminal behaviour (because the underlying logic is individuals are not responsible for their behaviour, or at least don’t have to be; as with Thorny blogging her invective anonymously). Enforcing such a system would be a total abuse of the already inappropriate powers of our modern nation states. Justice has to be blind to gender, race, religion – that is, to group identity and to any agenda toward identity politics. That fact is self-evident: how could a law professor fail on such a basic premise?

Worse, this contention of Longstaff and Avalos thus effectively turns feminism on its head. An identity based ethic as proposed by Lisa squared in this article, ironically the wellspring itself of the ‘isms that sadly still afflict our societies; especially racism and especially sexism. In this instance, stereotyping an individual by identity with a group, objectifying a single woman before the court as a unit of gender only, denying her uniqueness, thus allowing her to slip out from under her responsibility for what she says and does.

For proof, let’s get Socratic. Explain to me how the following conclusions misstate the logic of the no-prosecute proposition:

The contention that women should not be held responsible for their actions in making false rape complaints is also the contention that women must not be viewed by a blind justice, but in terms of identity as that group, women, and thus of needing a lesser capacity before the law.

How could it not mean this?

Furthermore, a lesser capacity before the law, must therefore infer a lesser competency outside of the law.

How could it not mean this?

Based on this Lisa squared would appear to defy the definition, or at least the movement, of a feminism at all, surely? How is not every women belittled by their argument?

And noting, as already intimated, this nonsense doesn’t stop here. If we have to make this special case in law for women, what of concessions for other groupings such as race or religion? Once justice is disposed of, how are we not left only with a system of injustice which will devolve to using the might of the state to advance causes and cliques, consequences be damned?

One more thing about the historical dead-end of radshitzyism, in all its guises, not just this branch of feminism, albeit this instance as applicable to Lisa squared. As this piece destroys Lisa Avalos’s credentials to be teaching law, in my opinion, so it casts doubts on the advocacy of Lisa Longstaff. I’m drawing a direct line from women shouldn’t be prosecuted for making false claims, to it must, surely, be quite alright for women to tell lies about men in court, period. Once language is detached from its concrete legs in semantics and thus veracity, then it becomes a slippery slope indeed. Which is the clue to where we arrive again, whenever I look at feminism: it's always that dictatorial Mr Marx and his group-think. Lisa squared's article is the logical illogical end point of a pointless academic feminist discourse that has finally deconstructed itself to nothing, as in, one’s word means nothing because words mean nothing. Well no, worse than that. A woman’s word means nothing, but a man is still to be held to his, with all the retrograde symbolic inferences that creates for gender relations.

Finally, to widen the frame on the piece to include its context, it started with this opening paragraph; note the language (my underlining):

Every time a celebrity is acquitted of rape allegations, a pernicious media campaign clamours for anonymity for defendants to stop women and children from wrecking vulnerable men's lives. Most recently, we saw this after the [Coronation Street star] Michael Le Vell trial.

I personally have misgivings even with the logic that flows from the issue of anonymity of defendants (men) standing trial for rape, to the argument of not prosecuting false complaints of rape. How actually are they connected? I see them as quite disparate.

Regardless, taking this opening on its own terms, I think there certainly is a valid argument for defendant anonymity in the criminal jurisdiction, and across all crimes, not just rape, including women who are on charges of false rape complaints. This because privacy is what truly marks the march toward the civilised society, which is why the tax surveillance states of the Left and Right in the West have seen the death of a nascent free, voluntary society. As I have written before on this blog:

I believe there should be no cameras in court. I believe that we all are innocent until proven guilty, and that other than in the very rare case of public safety, to be decided by the police, all defendants before criminal trial should have name suppression unless, or until, proven guilty. That’s the civil and civilised society. Yes, we must have reporters in the court, as a check on corruption and to ensure the law is delivered without bias, but that need only be an embargoed print media, with proceedings reported either only after a guilty verdict, or by withholding names in the case of innocence.

Can someone tell me why feminism has tied itself so wholly to the Left? Liberation can only be achieved within an individualistic classical liberal ethic (aka libertarian, or even anarcho-capitalist). Free the individual and you free the woman. The Left politick binds all to the state by force, never liberates. The Left politick is about pure state force required for redistribution, and thus can exact its violence only by the surveillance state. The contention of Longstaff and Avalos further proof. If carried into practice their contention would obliterate the notion of individuality, casting all men as rapists and all women as victims, with the enormous harm to innocent individual men from such false claims supposedly superseded by the ‘greater good’. That is evil. I know feminists aren't man-haters; the problem with Lisa squared being that is exactly what the language they use infers, such inference a pernicious falsehood. Will a reasoning feminism ever pull itself back from the brink of this, and enter into a civilised discourse? And don’t confuse my use of civilised with mainstream. Whatever the case, to do so it will first have to drop any hope of liberation by this too long engagement with Mr Marx; he’s always been a jailer, chaining us to the lives of complete strangers.

Or to simplify all the above, seriously, allowing women to make false complaints of rape with no consequences: neither of these women can see the consequence of this? Because every lawyer who has seen more than a clutch of marital separations and consequent custody battles could. Has Lisa Avalos ever actually practised law in the wild?

This is the end ... of Classical Liberalism.

This is how the post ends:

...  our recent history has seen the death of classical liberalism, which is the death of the identity and freedom of the individual, and with the death of the individual it is, of course, the death of arts, the death of culture, the death of all that gives value to a human life.  It's the death of hope and everything good. The pursuit of happiness ends, again, in the Gulag, albeit this time around, a Gulag of Good Intentions. And there’s no way back to a state of freedom, for against this collectivist menace of state forced altruism, the individual is powerless: that was precisely why the individual, the smallest minority in a society, was the one who needed the protection of the law, and from the tyranny of the mob. We have had voted the opposite.

This is how I got there ...

__________________________________________________________

Unfortunately the Founding Fathers, and Ayn Rand, were wrong on the ‘inalienable’ nature of the rights required for the protection of my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. A comment from Lindsay Perigo on his SOLO site about the nature of rights first got me to thinking on this, then, while reading Ben Kafka’s potted history on bureaucracy, I came across the following quotation:

Quote:

“The historian Keith Baker has argued that Comte and Saint-Simon were primarily concerned with bringing an end to the era of the French Revolution. Like Sieyès and Condorcet before them, Comte and Saint-Simon believed it was up to a class of experts—scientists, industrialists—to work out a new doctrine capable of bringing enduring social and political stability. The scientists would turn their observational skills onto the social and political realm, revealing its laws of development. The industrialists would then reconstruct institutions in such a way that their operations were in harmony with these laws. Unlike Sieyès and Condorcet, however, these postrevolutionary thinkers adopted what Baker has called a “theocratic” understanding of knowledge. Any deviation from rationality became a kind of heresy. “No one is so insane as to set himself up, knowingly, in revolt against the nature of things,” Comte argued (101). He had supreme faith in the power of knowledge.

The objective was to protect against arbitrariness in all of its manifestation. Earlier political thinkers had tended to associate arbitrariness mainly with absolutist governments, but for Comte any form of government was susceptible so long as it rested on “metaphysical” rather than “positive” principles. It hardly mattered whether the supreme legislator owed its existence to one contract or two, whether it was composed of one man or many. It could even exist in the sort of state envisioned by Rousseau in The Social Contract…”

In that last paragraph, I think Comte hits on where the founding fathers were wrong in the central premise of the Declaration of Independence, in their assumption the rights pertaining to freedom were inalienable, in other words, a metaphysical given:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – The Declaration of Independence

Ayn Rand in her Philosophy: Who Needs It describes a metaphysical given as:

Things of human origin (whether physical or psychological) may be designated as “man-made facts”—as distinguished from the metaphysically given facts. A skyscraper is a man-made fact, a mountain is a metaphysically given fact. One can alter a skyscraper or blow it up (just as one can alter or blow up a mountain), but so long as it exists, one cannot pretend that it is not there or that it is not what it is..

Then, pertaining to rights, although she says a “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context., a man-made fact, and further:

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Where she then confuses me is, as with the Founding Fathers, repairing to the notion of ‘inalienable’, as in:

Since Man has inalienable individual rights, this means that the same rights are held, individually, by every man, by all men, at all times. Therefore, the rights of one man cannot and must not violate the rights of another.

And again:

It is not society, nor any social right, that forbids you to kill—but the inalienable individual right of another man to live.

Both these quotations from Textbook of Americanism, suggesting to me the notion that such ‘inalienable’ rights are a ‘metaphysical given’, that they cannot be separated from the individual. I know I am right in the case of the Declaration, although I admit to be on unsure ground with Ayn Rand, on which I’m happy to be put right, although, whatever, for the sake of this argument, the notion of the rights I need to be a free man, namely, property rights, the right to not have force initiated on me, the right to pursue my happiness, the right to My life, these rights are not inalienable, they are not a given, and confusion over that point has been catastrophic to the cause of liberty: we have all perhaps been too prepared to let the voted evil in our social democracies shame us guiltily into accepting the state as our Jailer, as the Devine Redistributer, Saviour of the  Sheeple who are too dumb to run their own lives.

The proof is that if my right to be left alone was an inalienable one, then I would not be living in fear behind an Iron Drape: an IRD officer could not legally compel me into an interrogation room on threat of my freedom;  an IRD officer could not, by man-made law, have the power of God over me, with all aspects of my life open to them. The fact that the tax legislation does completely take my freedom and my privacy away, even though I may have lived a peaceful life, harming no one, proves that my right to that freedom, to be left alone, was anything but inalienable, at least, certainly not 'self-evident', to quote the Declaration, to everyone who mattered.  I surely can, and have, via the vote of the majority, been separated from my ‘right’ to live my life unhindered by those who would use force to coerce me to their ends, such as, most pointedly, the Big Brother state.

Because my right to freedom is not a ‘metaphysical given’, I’m looking at the world created by man around me, and am accepting I will never be a free man. Yes, human reason, un-bullied, will always arrive at the wisdom of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for each individual one of us, however, we don’t live in an age of political reason. To recall my first quotation, we live in an age where insane politicians have ‘set themselves, knowingly, in revolt against the nature of things’. An age where politicians bribe their electorates with the prospect of a free lunch, then tax, borrow and spend our liberty away trying to achieve the illusion, and when it all goes, and went, wrong, Western economies falling down, as they are, thought they could fix the problems of their Keynesian insanity, with more Keynesian insanity. An age where politicians thought the moral devastation wrought by welfarism, could be fixed by more welfarism. A sick age where men who mention freedom as the thing to strive for, are sneered at and jeered at by the feeble minded without the wherewithal to think or argue beyond ad hominem on every blog thread -   look at the comments to this thread. Where even the economists who profess to believe in markets, do so only with the passion of a frosty night, and in the final instance, repair to the well-being of the majority tyranny as the solution to their theoretical aggregates, blinded as they are by their utilitarian fascism – see this thread, and comments.  An age when a Finance Minister who pissed away ten years of New Zealand’s best commodity prices against the wall of the bigger thug state, and who designed an envy tax on the rich in such an absurd manner he distorted the entire tax field, for which IRD are still hanging taxpayers off hooks for, and who voted down knighthoods because he didn't believe in them, yet gets, and accepts, a knighthood. For the same reasons the Enlightenment saw the separation of state and church, now we need to separate the insane state from free markets, which, as the expression of the complex wants and desires of all the individuals in an economy, is to separate the state from the lives of a freed people.

And there’s the crux of an irresolvable problem.

Connoting Comte’s idea of ‘positive principles’, it would appear I have to first get the ‘village’ I live in to grant me those rights to allow my freedom; only in this way can I be freely part of the village, pursuing my happiness, as opposed to the village owning me as it does at present. But how to go about this?

Via reason I know the rights required for my freedom are the only foundation of the peaceful, civilised society, but those of us who understand this are now the smallest of minorities.  As will be the subject of a future post, I long ago came to understand that democracy is not going to give me, or any of us, the civilised, voluntary society: anything but. Our Western social democratic tyrannies are traveling in the opposite direction.

So, reiterating, if my rights to be left alone are not inalienable, then I have to conclude I must (somehow) fight for them, if I am to be a free man. It has been generations of free men thinking their rights to freedom were inalienable that has led to every tyranny that has been formed, from the individual tyrant to the tyranny of the majority, trampling over the individual’s pursuit of happiness, while necessarily stripping us of the liberty that reason  tells us is the civilised state for man. But, again, what is the nature of that fight that I must wage?

I have no idea where to go from here.

Not by violence: I believe in the non-initiation of force. And even though I might argue, well, indeed, that it would be in my self-defence, all that would lead to would be my certain demise at the hands of either men in uniform with assault rifles – think Kim Dotcom - or IRD taking my livelihood. I’m no martyr, and moreover, I’m a family man with responsibilities.

What about by convincing my fellow man of legislating the truly free, classical liberal society? Well, currently that’s democracy, and as I’ve already stated, it’s done the opposite.  From a Christian tradition that has inculcated a deadly altruism into Western thought, a disease that the secular Left, through the state school system, have then poisoned the minds of generations of our youth with, susceptible as they are to the notion of a ‘free lunch’ for life, and not having to be responsible for consequences of their actions, I conclude that the road to liberty, for myself, is never going to happen, not in my lifetime. The rot is a philosophical one, and goes almost to a hard-wired core of far too many minds: or rather, voters.

Thus I, freedom … excuse my language, but we’re screwed. Gramsci has done his job well, proven on that furtive battlefield in the nightmares we’ve created, where the rubber of the police state hits the road to our serfdom – tax legislation and enforcement of it:  IRD have won every major tax case in New Zealand over the last decade, this because of a brain-addled judiciary that has run like girls from the classical liberal ethic of protecting my life from abuse by the state, and the  immoral assumption they’ve inculcated that their job is rather to sacrifice my life on the bloodied altar of the common good of total strangers. Our limp wristed judges can now do little more than wallow in the immoral, violent, pig-sty they’ve created of self-sacrifice, well no, when it comes to judges, just ‘my’ sacrifice.

Free men must for the foreseeable future live subject to the whim of the mindless majority, and unprincipled, corrupt, power-seeking – or perhaps just intellectually retarded, more likely, reading their tweets - politicians, who by planning our economies, and our lives, are destroying them, and casting our societies into the immorality and violence – watch the news every night - of state slavery.

All of which brings me to an inevitable conclusion: our recent history has seen the death of classical liberalism, which is the death of the identity and freedom of the individual, and with the death of the individual it is, of course, the death of arts, the death of culture, the death of all that gives value to a human life.  It's the death of hope and everything good. The pursuit of happiness ends, again, in the Gulag, albeit this time around, a Gulag of Good Intentions. And there’s no way back to a state of freedom, for against this collectivist menace of state forced altruism, the individual is powerless: that was precisely why the individual, the smallest minority in a society, was the one who needed the protection of the law, and from the tyranny of the mob. We have had voted the opposite.

When I started this piece, I had no intention of ending it here. I had in mind a tight essay developing the opening premise.  But logic, and anger, has taken its inevitable course. The IRon Drapes are being drawn by the might of the police states we’ve voted in, delivering free men and women to the darkest nights, all over again. A process that has already begun in Europe where a fascist party is now voted into the Greek parliament, the first elected fascists in Europe since Hitler , and the Nazi salute in numbers seen on our TV’s in the Ukraine, while in Spain the president is demanding a European centralised authority to plan the lives of all Europeans, just like Hitler wanted, and just like Stalin. All the while the socialist, market hating, freedom hating president of America, imprisons the home of the free. As boringly predicable, in 2012, as it is depressing.