Sorry to make you wait for Stephen’s Monday post but here it is!!! All the thanks to everyone.
We have recently been inundated with people flinging accusations right and left at Judge Kavanaugh and rebuttals about credibility, standards of proof, presumption of innocence, and other legal jargon. You might be inclined from the title of this post to imagine that I, like oh so many others across the internet, am going to discuss that “presumption of innocence” regarding this hearing and its applicability in a confirmation hearing. You would be wrong to so presume.
I have no interest in delving into the obvious and trite concepts about which a hundred other people are all to willing to write extensively. Rather, it is a different concept of a presumption than the “presumption of innocence” into which I’d like to peer for our post today.
Over the law week the internet has been swamped with feminists, leftist, Democrats, and celebrities who all claim that they “believe” the various accusers of Judge Kavanaugh, some going to far as to call him a rapist, even though Dr. Ford’s accusations would have been merely of a groping as opposed to a rape.
(It is an unfortunate byproduct of modern PC legal terminology which has eliminated straightforward terms such as rape and groping to variations of sexual “abuse”, “assault”, “imposition” and other vague terms intentionally designed to muddy the legal waters.)
What do they all appear to have in common? Leftists are busy berating men, all men not merely conservative, but primarily anyone who does not follow lockstep in their “believe women” cult. Specifically, they are yelling at anyone who does not believe the victims.
Notice that? They are victims, not reputed victims, not alleged victims. They are declared victims of rape or attempted rape. (Because the allegation of groping or indecent exposure magically got upgraded in their hysteria to attempted rape.)
They have presumed before all else that a crime actually occurred. An interesting concept to presume, and that unquestioning and unquestionably, that some event actually occurred upon which the debate then proceeds as to whom you believe regarding that event.
Imagine, if you will that a man and woman are upon occasion seen arguing. One weekend, he goes on a fishing/camping trip. Neighbors never see or hear from her again, her family has no contact from that weekend. He is suspected of her murder. The lake where he was “fishing” is searched, as is the woods around where he claimed to be camping. No trace is found. Perhaps some blood traces are found in the trunk of his car, where he claims to have cut his arm when changing a tire a month or two before.
Nobody believes him. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. He gets arrested, tried, and convicted of murder. Five years later, she is found to have been living with her new boyfriend several towns away. This it a problem.
You see, such a conviction could only occur if one first presumes that an actual crime had been committed. There was a circumstance which corresponded with that presumption, but there was never any concrete evidence that an actual crime had occurred. All of the “evidence” becomes seen as questions of credibility of his alibi, of his veracity, but is presumed on the unshakable belief that a murder had actually occurred in the first place.
This is the case with the present declarations of people that these “victims” have to be believed. They have already presumed that these women are “victims” because they claim to be victims, therefore the feminist audience turns their attention to whether to believe the “victim” or the accused. Focus is directed at the credibility of the people, of the “witnesses”, of whether or not you could believe Mark Judge when he backed up the accused given his past alcohol problems, et cetera.
Some of the supporters of Judge Kavanaugh are even worse. I have heard them pronounce that they believe that Dr. Ford was a victim, but just that she mis-identified the accused. In the tradition of Solomonesque foolishness feigning to be wisdom, they will split the baby. You don’t have to believe that either of these people are lying, they could both be telling the truth, but one is just mistaken.
What an incredible disservice to reason! Some ally they are to concede the ground to the enemy. Which is to say, that approach buys into the premise, the presumption, that a crime was actually committed in the first place and places the accused in the position of testing their credibility.
Imagine trying to defend yourself not merely against a crime you did not commit, but a crime which may not have ever been committed. How are you going to test the evidence when there is no evidence to test?
Mrs. Pinky, @mrs_pinky85, recently reminded us of the case of Susan Smith, who reported that her car was car jacked with her two little boys in the back seat, claiming that the crime had been committed by some generic, nondescript “black man”. People became very concerned and started searching for this two missing boys.
The problem was that this reported “crime” of car jacking had never actually happened, it was presumed to have happened because the “victim” reported it. Instead, in this case, a different crime had been committed; the “victim” had murdered her own children.
The thing is, are we always wrong to make such a presumption?
“Murder Incorporated”, a name given to a certain New York mob/mafia group, had a thriving business of “offing”, “whacking”, or “murdering” people for their own mob and for hire for other people. Their theory was that if there was no body, then there was no crime. After all, you can’t prove the they murdered someone if you couldn’t prove that someone was actually murdered.
In the old Soviet Union and, everyone’s favorite villain, Nazi Germany, or really many, many dictatorships around the world, people are “disappeared”, that is to say they pull a “Jimmy Hoffa” and are simply never heard from again. We think we know what happens to those people, but we are never entirely certain.
It is not entirely unreasonable to presume that a crime has been committed when there is substantial circumstantial evidence pointing to a crime having been committed, because it is human nature to hide crimes and dispose of evidence. Yet, in many circumstances one can never really be certain that a crime has actually been committed.
Don’t make the mistake that this concept of presumption only applies to crimes, it is merely easier to illustrate the concept through the examples of crime.
To believe in Anthropogenic Climate Change, one has to first presume that the climate is changing in a fashion inconsistent with traditional cycles of climate patterns, before one can debate whether or not that change is caused by man. The proponents of the ideology have jumped past this first part by merely presuming that it is actually occurring.
The left screams about “privilege”, whether white, male, straight, or old, but if you look at their arguments, you’ll notice that the existence of such “privilege” is just presumed, it is never established to have ever actually existed. The debate for the left jumps immediately to how such privilege manifests itself in society; the right is stuck wondering just what hallucinogens those on the left are imbibing to jump to that conclusion.
Legal circles have a phrase for this when it comes to questioning witnesses, it’s called “presuming facts which are not in evidence”. The notion is to jump ahead of the argument and skip all of the difficult and tedious work of establishing the actual basis of any discussion.
In social and political context this is why people on the right and left almost always are talking past one another, because the basis of the argument is founded upon a presumption about reality or history which has not properly been established.
It is this basic presumption of a version of events without evidence which turns so many political and social debates into religious dogma to be believed and never questioned. That is what has killed the very notion of political debate, you cannot debate someone who fundamentally believes that reality is different than what you believe it to be.
Ergo, for any real debate to happen in our society, people have to learn to force their opposition to address the presumptions of reality which they have just leapt past. It is better to ignore your opponent’s actual argument and to take a step back and really examine the basis and assumptions upon which their argument relies.
Never argue whether Dr. Ford is credible by pointing out her inconsistencies, the true believe will never doubt her, but they would be hard pressed to prove that it ever occurred in the first place. That is why they keep the mantra “believe”, because if they doubt . . . they lose faith.
