Four female passengers FALSELY accuse Edmonton Cab driver of Sexual Assault: CAUGHT ON TAPE! — Must Watch
The reason why I’m posting this again, is because it dawned on me how much a man’s life, family, career,reputation and FREEDOM is worth to this band of toxic trollops. $13 Dollars…Canadian.
Shakespeare said, “What a piece of work is a man”. Such a piece of work that he is worth $13 Dollars to a group of women.
I will ask again, “Who would society believe by default had he not installed a camera?”.
NOTE: The police said there wasn’t enough evidence to charge the girls. Had it been a female cabbie and 4 young men conjecture alone of any sexual wrongdoing would have ruined their lives.
(via falserapeculture)
Yes and no. This is a really interesting question, and I’m glad you brought it up. I’ll bold this next part for the people who want a simple and pity answer: If I were born 100 years ago, I would be campaigning for men’s rights as I am today, BUT I would also be campaigning for women’s rights in equal measure.
See, back then men and women were both very much oppressed. Men were oppressed by their role as protector and provider, and women were oppressed by their role as homemaker and nurturer. Indeed, there were environmental reasons for those roles, but those started to be increasingly less valid as technological advances rendered the workplace safer and less dependent on physical strength, while at the same time reducing the demands of household labor such as laundry, food purchasing (supermarkets/better refrigeration) and many other similar things.
Feminism has changed that dynamic by overwhelmingly helping women to the exclusion of men. I can’t stress enough that helping women is not a bad thing. However feminism has not only just helped women without helping men, it’s actively opposed and attacked anyone who does try to help men, and many of its efforts to “help” women have actively harmed men.
One interesting aspect of feminism is that it has no end. There is no end to its goals, to its progression. I, on the other hand, long for the day when I can either hang up my hat and say “all done,” or go “all’s well here, I can move on to trying to help another group in need”. I have pretty concrete goals, even if they’re wide-ranging. Once men and women are at parity and the people doing advocacy are intelligent egalitarians rather than moronic ideologues, I can either devote myself just to trying to better what we have regardless of gender (as even “parity” doesn’t mean equality or equity, as parity can be “equally shitty”) or devote myself to something like EWB to help people in countries that need it. I don’t do this because I want to, I do this because if I don’t do it then I have no right to complain that it isn’t being done. If someone else would do it for me, I’d be overjoyed, but so far that hasn’t really happened.
In the end, I want to advocate for the people who need it most. Right now, that’s men, because not only do they have more inequity pointed at them than women from what I’ve seen, but there’s nobody helping them. I can step back and say, “There are tons of people advocating for women, who already arguably have it much better than men, so when it comes down to it they simply don’t need my active support right now.”
So that’s the complicated answer. I want to advocate for the people who need to be advocated for. A hundred years ago, that would have been both men and women. Today, it’s mostly men. Tomorrow, that balance could shift, but right now I have to work with what I’ve got.
I got this same ask couple weeks ago, and it’s been sitting in my drafts box ever since.
You took it in a sort-of-kind-of different direction than I was going to. My approach was, 100 years ago we were on the onset of the first world war. In that climate, where men were not only desperately needed to be an infinitely expendable resource for violence, but were glorified for being an infinitely expendable resource for violence, there would be no way a men’s right’s movement could even spawn. Countries’ entire generation’s of young men were dying in week-long periods of time, poof, dead. That is in no way a climate that could facilitate social reform. When thinking about these sorts of things, I look to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
I place the recognition of men’s inequalities within society despite the dogma that they’ve been battered by for decades right between Esteem and Self-actualization. But these men, these soldiers were sick, cold, hungry, wet, sleep deprived, choking on weaponized gasses, and standing in blood and piss and shit for weeks on end.
These soldiers were not safe in any sense of the word.
These soldiers could hardly maintain friendships in the war environment, and were without their families and were deprived of sexual intimacy.
These soldiers were completely dehumanized (especially the first world war, where generals were cozy in a tent away from the front lines plotting the movements and deaths of men they only barely recognized as human beings.) and lacking the physiological, safety, and love/belonging requirements, could not achieve any sort of self-actualization what so ever.
100 years ago, men would have been physically incapable of even recognizing their own ‘oppression’, to use Feminism’s buzzword.
I would not be campaigning for men’s rights in the first place. And realistically, I probably would have been one of feminism’s biggest supporters.
I saw this post in the misandry tag and wanted to reblog it, but it’s pretty horrible, and I’m not triggered by graphic images easily.
These pictures are of war.
These pictures are what men endure for women.
These pictures are of reality.
And that reality is a whole hell of a lot worse than anything patriarchy has ever done to women.
But this is the way the dialog feels to me:
“It’s none of your business. You’re just a sperm provider. Shut up and pay the bills and we’ll say when we want you to be a father.”
(via permutationofninjas)
(via uncutting)
And why not call it that? It passes the inversion test: if a man did this to a woman, it would be incorrigible blaring misogyny, complete with gender-specific slur (“What a b——-d”) and an exploitation of socially-rendered status, power and trust.
When Stuart Chaifetz sent his 10-year-old son to New Jersey’s Horace Mann Elementary School wearing a hidden audio recorder, he couldn’t have predicted what he would uncover.
The move came in reaction to accusations from the school that his son Akian was having “violent outbursts,” including hitting his teacher and teacher’s aide — claims that Chaifetz claims are against his son’s “sweet and non-violent” nature.
Akian, who has Autism, returned with a tape containing hours of apparent verbal and emotional abuse from his classroom aide and teacher — whom Chaifetz identifies as “Jodi” and “Kelly” — a recording which his father later published on YouTube.
The Feb. 17 recording started with Akian’s aide and the teacher, whom Collingswood Patch provides evidence may be Jodi Sgouros and Kelly Altenburg, respectively, based on a previously published online staff directory.
The two engage in inappropriate conversations, like joking about their alcohol abuse and sex lives in front of their students — all of whom have behavioral conditions and, according to Chaifetz, communication difficulties that prevent them from relaying the conversations to their parents.
“You would never get away with talking about your alcohol abuse the night before if this was a mainstream class,” Chaifetz says in the YouTube video. “And that’s the point, isn’t it? They knew none of those boys could go home and tell their parents that the person who ran that class was under the influence of alcohol and was throwing up.”
As the tape continues, the teacher and teacher’s aide’s behavior turns from inappropriate to cruel.
“Who are you talking to, nobody?” Kelly asked Akian, who sometimes talks to himself. “Knock it off,” Jodi chimed in.
According to the video, Akian became upset, and starting crying.
“Go ahead and scream because guess what? You’re going to get nothing until your mouth is shut,” the classroom official is heard saying. “Shut your mouth.”
Due to his son’s anxiety, Chaifetz, who is divorced from his wife, has to reassure Akian that he will return to his care after the boy spends time with his mother.
“It’s not a big deal,” he said, describing the reassurance ritual in the video.
When Akian asked his teacher for the same reassurance, however, she answered “no,” sending him into an emotional panic. The teacher’s aide, too, responded cruelly.
“Oh Akian, you are a bastard,” Jodi said, according to the audio recording.
Chaifetz said that the classroom aide was fired after he presented the recording to school district officials, but that the teacher remains employed in a different classroom.
Susan Bastnagel, Cherry Hill Public School District spokesperson declined to comment on the teacher’s continued employment, but told The Huffington Post that the incident is a “personnel matter that the district took seriously and handled appropriately.”
“That my son’s teacher was not fired and still works in the school district is an outrage I am not willing to allow to pass in silence,” Chaifetz said in an email to The Huffington Post.
“She betrayed my son and caused him great pain. If some union rule or HR regulation has allowed her to keep her job, then the law needs to be changed so that the next time a teacher bullies a child, especially one with special needs, they will be immediately fired. For me to do nothing would mean I was treating my son with as much disrespect as they had,” he added.
An online petition on Change.org and a Facebook page calling for the teacher’s termination have already received attention.
Akian’s troubling experience is not unique, nor is his father’s method of exposing believed wrongdoing in the classroom.
“I have also been stunned by how many emails I have received from people with special needs who were bullied by teachers when they were in school, and from parents who have a situation that mirrors what I went through,” Chaifetz told The Huffington Post. “These parents are desperate to find out what is happening to their child and have asked for help on how to wire them.”
This was the case for parents of a special needs student at Miami Trace Middle School in Ohio, who sent their daughter to school with a hidden tape recorder last fall after the girl repeatedly complained about teacher bullying.
The revelation was shocking: the educators on the recording called the child lazy and dumb, and forced her to run on a treadmill with increasing speed.
“Don’t you want to do something about that belly,” former teaching aide Kelley Chaffins says in the recording. “Well, evidently you don’t because you don’t do anything at home. You sit at home and watch TV.”
The girl and her father spoke to Ann Curry on NBC’s “TODAY” last November and, in a tearful interview, the concerned dad recounted how the abuse had affected his daughter.
“She got to where she didn’t want to go to school,” he said. “She was … starting to harm herself to keep from going to school and we knew we had to do something at that point.”
Chaffins was later forced to resign from her position.
Other bullying incidents have also been exposed by hidden cameras. After Julio Artuz, a 15-year-old at Bankbridge Regional School in New Jersey asked his teacher to stop calling him “special,” the teacher told him, “…I will kick your a— from here to kingdom-come until I’m 80 years old.”
Stuart Chaifetz’s Video (Youtube link)
Akian and his father, Stuart.
I wanted to share this with you all, and I am sorry about the title. I know it’s misleading and disingenuous, considering the content of the article.
I only title it that, to shine my dinky little spotlight on the ludicrousness of that old “If women ruled the world, there would be no war,” tripe. I only wanted to put that little idea at the front of everyone’s minds before reading this, so they could also recognize what complete bullshit it is.
Why? Because I’m pissed off. I’m pissed that this went on for as long as it did. I’m pissed that it took a parent strapping a fucking wire to his child and putting it in the school admins’ faces before they would even admit this was going on.
And I’m pissed that these women were not punished. The teacher’s aide? Fired. Not black listed, and no legal penalties. Just “we want you gone by monday”. Then there’s Kelly and the other staff involved.
They verbally abused the children. They had inappropriate conversations about their sex lives, about how much they hate their husbands and want them sterilized, about how wasted they got the night before. They fucked with those boys emotionally, treated them like less than humans— and they did it for a year and a half! And they got, get this:
relocated.
They kept their jobs.
Why? Because these are poor, sweet, innocent women we’re talking about. And this class of ten year old autistic boys? They can take it. Toughen up little guys, man up little guys. After all, women are gentle lovers of children. You know. Maternal instinct and shit.
And when a grown woman responds to a little boy, with autism for fucks sake, who’s crying by calling him a bastard?
Well ain’t that just a kick in the head.
Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz haven’t spoken since 1998.
Respected actor Phil Hartman voiced them, turning them into those wonderful, memorable characters.
One night 13 years ago, Phil’s abusive wife came home from a dinner with friends and started an argument with him. Phil threatened to leave her if she didn’t escape her drug habit.
Shortly before 3am, she sneaked up to a sleeping Phil and shot him thrice with a .38 caliber handgun.
How could someone so adored by all be killed by the woman he loved? Why didn’t he speak up about her growing abuse? Where was the support network for victims of domestic violence?
There wasn’t one, of course. More accurately, there isn’t. In the UK there are 7,500 refuge places for women. There are 60 for men. There is no government funding for any male refuge places, there is for a large proportion of the female refuge places. It’s a similar picture for the USA and Australia.
Obviously more women than men are victims of abuse though? Not really. In a metastudy with a sample size of 369,000, women were found to be as or more aggressive than men towards their partners. In most cases of domestic violence, violence is substantially reciprocal. In fact, Erin Pizzey who created one of the first women’s refuges and popularised the concept, has been sent death threats by feminists for her finding that “of the first 100 women who came to the refuge, 61 were as violent as the men they had left.” and that she fully believed women to be as capable of violence as men. Her dog was killed by feminists, her whole family threatened, she was forced to flee to America because feminists were so offended that one of the mothers of the women’s rights movement dare believe in equality instead of ideology.
It’s been 13 years since Phil Hartman was murdered. 13 years since Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz left our television sets. And what’s changed? Nothing, really. 835,000 men are physically assaulted by their female partners each year in the USA.
According to the Duluth model of domestic violence, which is commonly used by law enforcement and the judicial system (including in Australia), the man is always the aggressor.
Isn’t that shocking? We know, beyond any doubt, that men are victims of much domestic abuse. Yet if a man calls the police to report his being abused, chances are that he’ll be arrested. Because the model we use to combat abuse assumes that he must be the party responsible for it.
Feminists make their cases emotively, and they make them cleverly. But ultimately, feminism is not an ideology based on impartial evidence. It’s more aptly, though maybe a tad too extremely, described as a hate group and support network for people who fetishise their own victimisation. Australian feminist groups viciously protested a modest increase in the rate of women being arrested for domestic violence as though it were evidence of the patriarchy trying to silence women. How ridiculous is that? At no point is the concept even considered that women might be responsible for any domestic violence.
I only wish Phil Hartman’s death had led to an increased awareness of male victims of domestic violence. But it didn’t. His death was empty and meaningless because what it stood for went against the prevailing ideology.
Thank you, feminism.
(via vegetarianlyfe)
(via uncutting)
You can’t make this shit up.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why so many people are so wary of feminism.
One of the most common attacks on masculists/MRAs/anyone who actively speaks against misandry is that they’re “all privileged hetciswhiterichablebodied males”.
How does this actually bear up, though?
Well, I look at the people I see speaking about these issues on tumblr. I count them up.
- feministsaresexist? Woman.
- privilegedenyingfeministcunt? Woman.
- zenyattagal? Woman.
- viraginous? Woman.
- chromatophobiccuttlefish? Female. (Self-stated, don’t know if identifies as a woman.) Also asexual.
- theunisexbrigade? Multiple admins, at least one believed to be a woman.
If we add “cis” as a qualifier we can eliminate more.
- nerdydyke? Identifies as genderqueer, not sure whether here or above.
- mensrights? Run by a trans man.
- iffeminismisforequality? At least one admin is transgender.
If we add “heterosexual” we wipe out another couple, as well as a bunch from above a second time.
- theamazingatheist? Bisexual. (speaks about men’s rights though explicitly not a MRA)
- Myself? Pansexual.
- Many of the people above a second time. (At least half are queer, outside of gender.)
How many do we have left afterwards? A relative handful.
- benkling
- just-smith
- vegetarianlyfe
- fuckyeahmenfolk
- sgtkirby (
bit of anasshole, really, and hardly effective at speaking for anything)- jojobear11 (traditionalist moron)
Of those, at least three are among the very most mild of those present, and all of those three actually identify as feminists as well.
This list has excluded people for whom I don’t know any of these things, though that’s not a massive number. It’s also just a quick look, and I know I’m missing a couple, including several that I remember as being women, trans or queer. I’ve also skipped some people like meravie whose beliefs may fall this way but generally speak about other issues.
Regardless, the point is that if we even go down to “het-cis-male/man” we come up with a significant minority. It’s far from some kind of “privileged boys’ club”, and it represents people of all sexes, genders and sexualities. In fact, we’d find that the most significant bias is actually towards whiteness, though that’s not a surprise given that most are from the U.S, Canada, Australia and the U.K, all of which are overwhelmingly white. It’s obviously not a representative sample, but it does mean something.
Concern for the rights and treatment of men is not something purely coming from the privileged. It’s not purely coming from men. It’s not purely coming from the cisgendered. It’s not purely coming from the heterosexual. Few are misogynists. Few are traditionalists. Few subscribe to any religion, let alone any ones considered “patriarchal”.You want us to stop stereotyping feminists? Stop stereotyping us!
None of the information is guaranteed, as I don’t always know for sure.
Anonymous Asks:
mensrights Said:
The MRA movement is a small movement. At every turn it is shut down by the current accepted social rhetoric that triumphs the idea that men either do not need help, or should not deserve help. Feminist organizations also see Men’s charities as a threat for one reason or another, and they (having been established for years) have the stature and power to shut men friendly programmes down.
I recall an instance where a panel discussing giving aid to male victims of domestic abuse being crashed by feminists, where they disrupted the dialogue by screaming things like “Woman beater”, “This is outrageous” , “You want to protect men who hit woman”, and bafflingly enough “No means no”.
This is a crude, low level example, but the bias does scale up. So as of now, the only professional faction of the Men’s Rights Movement that is recognized is Father’s Rights.
I would suggest you look into Fathers 4 Justice who are active in their protesting and lobbying. And another that comes to mind would be SAVE which is only barely male friendly, as while they do acknowledge that men suffer from domestic violence they put it at women 85% and men 15%, which though it hardly does reality justice, is a lot better than what every other domestic violence program states i.e. women 100% men 0%.
Lastly The Innocence Project is coming to me. They go about exonerating falsely accused and unjustly sentenced prisoners. I do not believe their goals are inherently men’s rights leaning, it’s just that the vast majority of men they do free were falsely accused of rape. And that link directs to the sites custom search for the rape cases they looked into that turned out to be false. 2,030 results. Ouch.
I’m sorry that there aren’t many resources out there in the way of organizations. As I said it’s incredibly difficult to set up even nonprofits, when nobody is interested in what you’re trying to accomplish. If you want to do some reading, though, I can suggest you look into Christina Hoff Summers, who remains to be my favourite feminist. And that staple of the men’s rights movement, Warren Farrel. That’s two links, there.
Hope I helped.
In early 2001, an 11-year-old Kalama girl named Cassandra Ann Kennedy told police her dad raped her on at least three occasions. Her father, Thomas Edward Kennedy, denied the allegation, but he was convicted by a jury and sentenced to more than 15 years in prison.
In January, Cassandra Kennedy, now 23, told Longview police she made it all up. So after serving more than nine years in prison, her father was released last week and the charges against him were dismissed.
“I did a horrible thing,” Cassandra told detectives in January, according to a police report. “It’s not OK to sit and be locked in this horrible place for something you didn’t do. It’s just not right.”
Cowlitz County Prosecutor Sue Baur said Friday she’s never seen a case quite like it. The innocent are sometimes freed after years in prison by the work of pro-bono legal teams and new DNA evidence. But Baur said she’s never known a child to return to authorities a decade later and recant, certainly not with enough credibility to scuttle a case.
“This is something my whole office is talking about,” she said. “This is the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen.”
Reached Friday, Thomas Kennedy, now 43, declined to comment, saying he’s simply trying to get on with his life. Longview police, who investigated both the initial allegations in 2001 and the details that later exonerated Kennedy, also declined to comment and referred questions to Baur.
In recent months, Cassandra Kennedy has been staying at Mountain Ministries, a Christian addiction treatment center near Kelso, according to police reports. Gary Miller, the organization’s director, said Thursday evening that she is in Mexico doing missionary work and can’t be reached.
Baur said Cassandra Kennedy will not be prosecuted for her apparent lies about her father, partly because prosecutors do not want to discourage people in similar circumstances from coming forward.
‘I needed to do what was right’
Cassandra Kennedy called Longview police on Jan. 23, saying she wanted to talk about her father’s 2002 conviction, according to investigative reports. She sat down with a pair of detectives at the department three days later.
“I need to do what is right,” she told them, according to a report.
No, Cassandra told police, her father never touched her. For nearly a decade, she said, her father had been sitting in prison based on her lies.
“I just want him to be out and freed,” Cassandra said in her interview with the police. Then, she said, “I will be free on the inside.”
Cassandra said she got the idea of setting up her father from a friend whose stepfather was sent to prison for a child sex crime. “I thought that is what I would do to make my dad go away,” she told police in January.
In her recent interviews with police, Cassandra recalled testifying against her father during his trial and “having to point at him and look at him and say who he was — and how bad I felt, all the guilt, thinking, ‘Can I take it all back?’ “
“I remember being so unhappy and scared that they were going to convict him,” Cassandra told the detectives in January.
Police reports tell the story of an angry little girl who felt neglected by her father and, by her own admission, took “vengeance” on him.
Thomas Kennedy and his wife divorced around 1991, and their daughters, Cassandra and her older sister, began spending one weekend a month with their father, according to court documents. The girls slept on foam mattresses in the living room of Kennedy’s Longview home.
‘I took vengeance’
As a child, Cassandra Kennedy liked Rollerblades, camping and swimming — typical kid stuff. But she told police her fellow Kalama Elementary students made fun of her clothes and her “buck teeth.” She began experimenting with alcohol, she said.
The girl wrote in her journal, a copy of which is part of the court record, that her teacher “isn’t nice and she never calls on me and she gives me mean looks.” In 2000, a few months before she accused her father of incest, Cassandra was expelled from school for saying in a letter to her teacher that she was thinking about bringing a gun to school and shooting “everyone,” according to a medical report. Cassandra had a couple of sessions with a counselor following the incident.
She attended Kalama High School until her junior year, when she dropped out, according to investigative reports. Cassandra said she became addicted to pills in her late teens and worked a few odd jobs, for just a month or two, at McDonald’s and PetCo. By 2010, she was using meth and had felony convictions for burglary and theft, the reports said.
In January, Cassandra told police she still has fond childhood memories of sitting on her father’s lap as he drove his pickup to collect wood pallets and wire to scrap.
“I was daddy’s girl,” she said. “I was with my dad!” But, she said, her father wasn’t around much when she was little and that he drank heavily, smoked pot and partied.
“I wanted him to love me, and I didn’t think he did at that time,” she told the detectives.
So, Cassandra said, she made up the rape story, largely because her father disappointed her. “He wasn’t showing up. I wanted him away so he would stop hurting me,” she said this year. “I took my own vengeance.”
In a 2001 interview with police, Cassandra said she wanted her father to take a lie detector test. When an investigator asked her what questions her dad should be asked, none of her suggested queries involved sexual abuse. Instead she wanted police to ask Kennedy: “Do you still smoke pot? Do you like to your kids? Do you still drink?”
Kennedy never took a lie detector test on the advice of his attorney, according to investigative documents.
Cassandra said this year that, as a child, she didn’t understand the consequences of her lies. She told police she hadn’t thought Kennedy would go to prison if he was convicted. “I just thought he would go away, you know, go to jail for a little bit, be out of my life,” she said.
Baur, who was the prosecutor during the case, recalled Friday that all of the pieces in the investigation seemed to fall into place.
“It just totally made sense,” she said.
Most startling, Baur said, was that Cassandra told the story of the abuse again and again with amazing consistency. Yet, Baur said, “she did not appear to me to be the most precocious 11-year-old.”
‘Peace’ a code word for abuse
Cassandra first told her teacher about the alleged incest in early 2001, according to reports. Teacher and student worked out a code word to signal that the abuse was continuing — “peace.” Cassandra told police it wasn’t long before she called the teacher: “It happened again,” she said. “Peace.”
Cassandra also wrote about the alleged abuse in a journal that included among its pink and purple pages other mundane entries about boys, Cassandra’s slipping grades and her older sister’s annoying behavior. On the cover, written in a little girl’s haphazard letters, were the words “Confidential. No taking peeks.”
Later in 2001, in an interview with Longview police investigators, Cassandra used stuffed animals to illustrate what her father had allegedly done to her, reports said. She also drew a picture of a bathroom where she said one of the rapes happened. Police later measured and photographed the room.
Cassandra’s account included frightening detail, according to police reports. But if it wasn’t true, police wanted to know this year, how could an 11-year-old know so much about sex? Cassandra told police in January that she began engaging in sexual activity as a second-grader. She also said she may have known what to tell police from watching a movie or from walking in on adults having sex.
In March of 2001, Cassandra was examined at a Vancouver clinic where she told a doctor about the alleged abuse. “She looked at me and said, ‘Are you telling the truth?” Cassandra said this year of her appointment with the doctor. “I lied to her and said, ‘Yes.’ “
The doctor found trauma in Cassandra’s groin area, according to a report.
Police described Cassandra’s allegations during an interview with Kennedy in March of 2001. Kennedy, who was at the time a laborer and equipment operator at Metro Metals Northwest in Kelso, “denied doing anything,” a Longview investigator wrote in a report. “He was very upset. He told me he would do anything to prove he didn’t do anything.”
A jury convicted Kennedy of three counts of first-degree rape of a child in 2002, and now-retired Cowlitz Superior Court Judge Jim Warme sentenced him to more than 15 years in prison.
Until then, Kennedy’s criminal record had included convictions in the 1990s for fourth-degree assault, reckless driving and driving with a suspended license.
Cassandra’s family members recalled to police this year that, during a 2002 trip to the beach, Cassandra told her mother she’d lied about the rape allegations, according to reports. However, Cassandra took back the statement a day later and insisted she’d been telling the truth all along, family members told police.
Kennedy, who was serving his sentence at the Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Aberdeen, appealed his conviction, alleging his defense attorney had been incompetent, but the appeals failed. Kennedy wasn’t scheduled to be released until 2016.
On Feb. 15, after Longview police told prosecutors that Cassandra Kennedy was recanting, Baur wrote an urgent letter to Superior Court Judge Stephen Warning. “I need to inform you that I have been made aware of new, credible material evidence that potentially creates a reasonable likelihood that Mr. Kennedy is innocent of those crimes,” Baur wrote, adding that her staff was “continuing to work with investigators to uncover the truth.”
Kennedy was brought from Stafford Creek to the Cowlitz County Jail in late February, Baur said. During a hearing last Monday, Judge Warning ruled that Cassandra’s statements to police this year are credible. He also found that the physical trauma reported by a doctor in 2001 may have been caused by a sexual experience that took place before the dates of the alleged abuse, Baur said.
Asked if there had been missteps in the initial investigation, Baur said she has recently reviewed a recording of the little girl’s testimony and has been rethinking every detail of the case. She noted that 12 jurors found enough evidence at the time to convict Kennedy and that the conduct of prosecutors, defense attorneys and Judge Warme was upheld by the appeals court.
“There should be no indictment of the system,” she said.
Instead, Baur said, it’s simply a case of a victim withdrawing her story.
“Unfortunately, a man spent 10 years in prison before that happened,” she said.
Read more: http://tdn.com/news/local/local-girl-lied-about-rape-father-set-free/article_bf9cac36-7c7a-11e1-a9e4-001a4bcf887a.html#ixzz1r20LKewO
It’s 8:00 PM. Elaine is signing on to her Tumblr.
She’s bored, and looking for an argument. She therefore decides to browse the ‘misandry’ tag: she knows misandry doesn’t exist, and it’s always fun laughing at the men who are whining about it. Lo and behold, there’s some douchebro in there talking about rape, and moaning about all the ‘women only’ rape support facilities. This is going to be easy. She adds her comment:
Fuck you and your butthurt mansplaining nonsense. You think you know shit about rape? Try being a woman. Try having to be frightened of going outside. You clearly have no fucking idea what that is like, because the whole world is a safe space for you, asshat. Check your fucking privilege. If you have a problem with women getting support, and want to constantly derail things to put the spotlight back on men, then you are what we call a misogynist. Stop defending rapists. Stop talking about issues which don’t affect you, because you’re speaking over the real victims here; and that’s intensely problematic.
Earlier that day, Gary had summoned up the courage - for the first time since being brutally raped and beaten by a stranger - to speak up about his experiences. He had dealt with the pain and trauma of the act itself, but what he had not prepared for was the aftermath. As a man, he had found little to no resources to support him, whilst there were plenty for women. As a man, he had been unable to find justice in court. In fact, even in everyday life people were refusing to take his rape seriously. He’d done some research, and found that he was not alone. Rapists are much less likely to be sentenced if their victims are men. All criminals are much less likely to be sentenced if their victims are men. He found this intensely depressing, and this wasn’t helped by the fact that other statistics showed that men were more likely to be sentenced, arrested, given higher sentences, and even given death penalties for the same crimes: including rape. He found that his area wasn’t alone in neglecting male victims, and that the apathy he had encountered was reflected throughout society and the media: with many even finding the rape of men comedic. Words could not describe the harrowing effect these revelations had on him. He also found that, as a man, he was at a much greater risk of stranger violence: making the other statistics nonsensical. Although he had learnt to keep his mouth shut and suffer in silence, the support of these statistics had finally motivated him to beginning speaking about these injustices against men: or ‘misandry’. He had therefore written his post on the need for more resources for men, expecting that the misandry tag would be a safe space for those of similar experiences.
Here’s the thing about talking to a stranger on the internet: they’re a stranger. You don’t know them. All that you can do is assume, and that is an incredibly dangerous game. There are positive assumptions: for example, assuming that somebody with men’s rights is a lonely boy with a neckbeard and tiny genitals who is just angry that he can’t get laid. That’s the sort of assumption you recognise, and hopefully avoid. I’ve seen all of those made, and by ‘feminists’ who would cry ‘body shaming’ or ‘typical woman-hater, my value is directly linked to whether men find me attractive’ at the exact reverse. ‘Feminists’ who know that the ‘hairy lesbian man-hater’ stereotype for feminists is ludicrous, and who will yet assume that all ‘men’s rights activists’ are ‘hairy virgin woman-haters’ - and who are happy in this context to use ‘hairy’ and ‘virgin’ as insults. These are the assumptions you recognise, and - if you aren’t a bigot - learn not to make.
But there are also negative assumptions: assuming that somebody isn’t something. If you’re interested in men’s rights, you can’t be a woman. You can’t have been actually oppressed. You can’t have experience with domestic or sexual violence, because they are women’s issues. You can’t be less privileged than the ‘feminist’ harassing you. You can’t be triggered by her ‘calling you out’. You can’t be depressed and unable to take it. In fact, begging her to stop the violent attitude is ‘tone policing’. You can’t have severe learning difficulties, or be innocently ignorant. No, the reason you are wrong about an issue must be that you are evil. You also can’t apply their own standards to them, because as vermin you don’t deserve the same rights. As they say: those guidelines to listen to people with respect are only when dealing with actual oppressed groups. So if Elaine doesn’t think you’re an oppressed group, even if you’re telling her that you are, she can still treat you like scum for your whining and refuse to check her privilege. Because she’s assumed that you are the most privileged person in existence, and so she - the able-bodied rich hetero cis white woman - can happily laugh at you for never having experienced oppression.
The thing about men’s rights spaces is that there are Garys. If you’ve suffered, and been let down by the system, you’re going to want to complain. That’s why, if you go to a men’s rights safe space, you’ll find a higher proportion of survivors than you will in the general population. This is why unprovoked attacks by Elaines, which are also commonplace, are completely unacceptable. Note that they attack a man’s post in a men’s community about a man’s experience of being a man, and accuse them of ‘speaking over the real victims’. Every reference in here is taken from personal experience, by the way. It’s not even the worst. Doing nothing else but saying that men suffer too, I’ve received a great deal of verbal abuse, including being told to kill myself or being accused of sexually harassing a child to smear my name. That does not feel good. But that’s what we get from those wanting to defend their own narrow brand of ‘equality’, and so a man opening up about his rape will be called a rape apologist: and all because of negative assumptions. So, when talking to strangers, be careful - not just for your safety, but for theirs as well. Everybody is a threat.
Including you.
(via vegetarianlyfe)
Prostate Cancer and Breast Cancer (by theignoredgender)
“Now, am I saying that it’s a bad thing that Breast Cancer’s getting all this funding and attention? No. What I’m saying is that it’s unfortunate that no other cancer get’s anywhere near the attention and funding that Breast Cancer gets.”
