The Total Lunacy Of "Rights" Stripped From Consideration Of Their Consequences

Our Judicial System Is Full Of Such Lunacy, Our Journalism Even More Full Of It

IN THE RECENT POST HERE about the cultural god of secular reverence, alcohol, I made a comment that got some flack, as I expected it would, doubting that there is any such thing as a right to get drunk, one of a number of deputed "rights" that, if thought of with a minimal amount of rigor and an honest requirement that their results be considered in that assignment of virtue to them, would reveal that they are nothing like rights but are the destruction of rights.  Whether self-destroyed or destroyed through the exploitation of those looking for those so vulnerable by their own action doesn't really much matter when it comes down to who is going to suffer the consequences and who is going to reap the rewards of rape culture mixed with alcohol culture.

One of the people who trolls me called my younger relatives mentioned in the story "assholes" for thier sucumbing to one of the commonest consequences of drinking alcohol and accused me of saying because of them he should be deprived of going to his "watering hole" and sacrificing the few brain cells left to him in his senescence, even though I noted that one of the tragic features of the experiment with prohibition was that it didn't work to wipe out drinking.  Apparently his imbibing at his "watering hole" (he is never at a loss for a cliche even as he's at loss for anything like an original idea) has the effect of diminishing his reading comprehension, I hold him up as a cautionary example.

Anyway, moving on, here's a piece from the National Catholic Reporter about the not only organized but corporatized use of alcohol as the most common of date rape drugs, not only in plain sight but as the focus of a national media industry.

[Note, I have removed the ampersands because I don't provide links to hate. assault and rape promotion sites]

When Florence [note, that name is a pseudonym] was 18, an intimate video of her in a bar was filmed on a Jesuit college campus. Posted to a social media account named for that college, the sexually exploitive video quickly gained millions of views.

This is not an isolated story. It's the story of Barstool Sports, and it's playing out at Catholic universities across the country.

Barstool Sports is an infamous multimillion-dollar media empire of sports and sex. The website and its social media presence combines sports coverage, lowbrow viral internet moments and pictures of highly sexualized women (including a "Smokeshow of the Day"). The brand is so popular it has its own sportsbook for betting and a flavored vodka, Pink Whitney. The barstoolsports Instagram account emphasizes short viral videos and boasts over 12 million followers. It traffics in "college humor," the culture of raunchy jokes, laissez-faire sexual mores, binge drinking and viral videos that soaks many campuses like cheap beer.

Most colleges in America have smaller, localized Barstool accounts on Instagram and Twitter. Catholic schools are no exception: Of the 27 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States, only three do not have associated Barstool accounts. Though these localized accounts claim no official affiliation with the schools, they have names like barstoolholycross or fairfieldbarstool and post content tailored to their schools' student bodies. Students send submissions to these accounts to have memes and photos or videos of drunken exploits on campus posted for people to laugh at. It was on one of these college Barstool Instagram accounts — for a Jesuit school — that the video of Florence was first posted.

I'll start by saying that the piece exposes the human piece of excrement who has become very rich from this,

Barstool's incredible reach has made its founder, Dave Portnoy, an internet celebrity, known for his abrasive personality, crude humor and proud political incorrectness. A few months ago, he was the focus of a Business Insider article that highlighted three young women, as young as 19, who had sex with Portnoy, now 45, which they said turned humiliating and violent. Two of the women told Business Insider that Portnoy "both choked and filmed them without advance permission."

An additional three young women came forward later, also saying that Portnoy filmed them without permission; one woman recounts Portnoy fracturing her rib during sex. Portnoy denies the allegations of choking and filming without consent, though he acknowledges the rib injury. He has a well-documented history of pursuing young women barely at the age of consent, and has had three sex tapes leaked, including one in which he violently chokes a woman wearing a leash.

Portnoy went live on Twitter in a ranting, hourlong video to protest his innocence, rail against Business Insider and try to discredit the women, declaring, "I've never taped a girl without her consent in my life."

The same cannot be said of Portnoy's legion of fans, called "stoolies."

I would very much like to shut that down, punish the boys and scummy men with prison terms for what they are doing but that's not going to be done in this age of such promiscuously created "rights" as will keep this and its like up and running and making millions for the human stools (a word which is perfect for what they are) such as this Portnoy.  

Wanting to do something more likely to reduce the number of victims, I'll ask if Florence (reminding you it's a pseudonym) was exercising a "right" when she drank herself into a state where she was easy pickings for a sexual assailant and video maker to be made by them an object of commerce for this kind of operation CHOOSING A BAR TO DO IT BECAUSE THAT'S WHERE YOU FIND SUCH SELF-MADE VICTIMS.  

What did that "right" consist of?   Either the one to get drunk or to exploit the drunkenness for international publication for profit?

How did its creation as a "right" escape being part of what the result of it was, what it could very predictably be turned into as part of the ambient "civil liberties" industry-Supreme Court distorted decision that made the entire world a porn show?  I am certain that the "civil liberties" law establishment would take cases protecting the scumbags involved in the use of Florence?   

How do the civil liberties lawyers, judges and "justices" escape any mention as being the primary permitters of the exercise of the "right" to drink yourself into being a victim of sexual assault and, even more so, the publishing industry that encourages and profits from this situation?  They should have this ordure in the courts wiped all over them.

And let us not forget the part played in that by journalists, opinion writers, other writers, talking heads in the media, etc. who are as much a part of this as the judges, "justices" and "civil liberties" lawyers who probably don't make as much money out of their part in the rape-alcohol complex but who are well paid by the big shits who make the big bucks from it.

As I said last week, "rights" real and court created should not be separated from the consequences of their being exercised.  Any "rights" which produced malevolent, destructive, even fatal consequences are "rights" that bring those results.  

AND THESE "RIGHTS" COME WITH THE COST OF FAR MORE REAL RIGHTS FOR THE WOMEN WHO LOSE THEIRS AS A RESULT OF THE "RIGHTS" BEING EXERCISED.  

Any such "rights" being considered in anything but the most negative manner and something to be suppressed is sheer and utter lunacy of the kind which constitutes the greatest part of current legalistic, judicial and, especially, journalistic degeneracy.

If "rights" are held to have those consequences, the routine, rote thinking about them as unquestionable goods is dangerous - many such "rights" are a positive evil in life that should be suppressed if not abolished.  They are not an evil that we are required to just live with because some "justices" or judges or civil-liberties lawyers can live safe lives in their protected enclaves of privilege, not having to live with those consequences they lay down for even the foolishly young and vulnerable.  

Florence was not exercising a real right to drink to the point of inebriation, she was suckered by the popular culture into abandoning her most real of all rights to self-possession, self-protection and self-defense by encouragement to take what was predictably, in the context she drank in, a date-rape drug.  She was, first and foremost, suckered by the alcohol culture that is ubiquitous and presented as a virtue, as a "right of passage" in one of the most destructive and stupid parts of modern and college kulcha.  One of long standing just as the culture of rape enablement is, just as the culture of male supremacy is.  She was duped out of full possessions of her rights, no doubt her youth and lack of maturity making her more vulnerable to it.  I would guarantee you that the media and liquor and internet industries that brought this about are all dominated, heavily dominated by rich, entitled males.

She has my complete sympathy and I wish she could bring legal action to shut down the site and punish those who used her that way, I think that should be the state of the law, but it isn't. She has a right to my complete sympathy, I was an idiot kid of exactly that kind, myself at that age, not a little of that alcohol related.

What she does not have a right to is me ignoring the part she was suckered into playing in her own victimization.  Ignoring that would get neither her nor any other woman OR GAY KID OR ANYONE ELSE so cheated and victimized one bit of self-possession and self-protection, it would be to further her and their victimization by the predators who use the status quo in the way they do.

That alcohol should not be used that way by the rapist-boys who go to such places is a different matter and one which was not in any way in her control.  The rape-boy who took advantage of her was clearly on the look out for someone who had made herself vulnerable.  If it happened in another bar it may have been a similarly immature boy.  As I said, I wish that the law punished and prevented that but, unfortunately, in the addlement of the law and "civil liberties" the actions of the date-rapist-publishers are called "rights" and given protection that their victims are not given at all.  Considering the situation, the law encourages exactly what happens to the girls who are so victimized in this.

The focus of the piece published in the NRC is the presence of this organized date-rape internet presence on Catholic campuses but, as it notes, its presence is something of a ubiquity.  I'm as concerned for girls and boys - and anyone who surrenders their adulthood to drunkenness has forfeited their right to be considered as an adult - at secular and public universities and colleges and outside of public education as I am those who go to Catholic institutions.  I have a very dim view of Catholic higher and elite prep-level educational institutions, they are not in any way handling this responsibly, I doubt they're handling it at all.

I remember a number of years ago hearing a radio piece - I think it was on Radio Canada International - in which European university students talked about their shock at the binge drinking then common among students from the US and Canada, saying that while drinking was common among their European colleagues, the kind of drunkenness that was common among Americans was rare in most places in Europe.  I don't know if that's true or not, I do know that even when I was in school the drinking was out of control and from what I can see, it's worse than it was then.  

The idea that what these addled adolescents are engaged in is an expression of "rights" is one of the clearest and most revealing of absurdities in our promiscuous elevation of liberties, those wisely allowed and those massively stupidly and irresponsibly encouraged, to the status as "rights."  Some of that is due to the idiocy of thinking everything in life is a matter of secular legalism and that anything allowed under law is a positive good.  That is extremely stupid but such stupidity is among the biggest flaws in modern life.  I take it as another symptom in what Marilynne Robinson said, that modernism is a failed project.  If it can't be trusted to make a distinction between real rights which are an enhancement of self-possession, self-determination, self-protection, of moral behavior and the various "rights" to be talked into stripping yoursel of all of those while it protects the "rights" of those who prey on those so stripped of their real rights, it is voluntarily and obviously wrong.