"Jackie’s rape story was false. So why hasn’t the media named her by now?"
You're actually trying to use a story headlined that the "rape story was false" to argue that the same newspaper hasn't actually concluded that the story was false?
A quote from the same story: "Her story has been shown repeatedly to be false, both through news reporting and an extensive police investigation."
> But they never come to the conclusion you did: that there was no rape and the story was entirely fabricated.
...really?
And yes, I am dead serious that there is no evidence that the story was entirely fabricated. There is evidence details were fabricated. You take that as evidence that the story was fabricated in its entirity, but the quoted editor does not and I do not.
I don't understand why you find it so hard to entertain the possibility that a pathological liar might be raped and then exaggerate the details of the story to gain sympathy.
Why do you see that as an impossibility?
I acknowledge it as a possibility, I acknowledge the possibility that she was not raped at all and made up the story from whole cloth, and I acknowledge that we don't know which really happened. Just as the quoted editor did.
You find evidence that contradicts the story in its entirity. For example, if she claimed to have been raped on a night that there was evidence she was in a different country, that would be proof.
> No rape seems to have happened
You have no strong evidence that suggests that no rape happened. There's also no strong evidence that a rape did happen. Somehow out of that, you believe a rape didn't happen, which is illogical and cruel.
The alleged rapist not existing isn't strong evidence suggesting that it didn't happen?
> There's also no strong evidence that a rape did happen. Somehow out of that, you believe a rape didn't happen,
Wait, what? Even if there's no strong evidence that a rape did happen I should just believe it happened anyway? That's a fascinating approach. What other things should I believe even if there's no strong evidence for them? For example, what if somebody claimed you committed assault, but there was no evidence?
> which is illogical and cruel.
I suspect you wouldn't be resorting to crude appeals to emotion and playing to the cheap seats with rhetoric if you had a real argument to make here.
No, that's evidence that if there was an assailant, she doesn't know him.
> Even if there's no strong evidence that a rape did happen I should just believe it happened anyway?
You misunderstand my position. I am just asserting that we don't know whether a rape happened. I do not believe it happened, nor do I believe that it didn't. I am certain that I cannot know.
>> illogical and cruel
> I suspect you wouldn't be resorting to crude appeals to emotion and playing to the cheap seats with rhetoric if you had a real argument to make here.
What? I am doing nothing of the sort. I am making very specific claims: 1) that based on principles of logic, you can't infer from the evidence that no rape occurred, and 2) to do so is cruel to the alleged victim, who may just be a rape victim who lied about the details.
There's nothing emotional or cheap about that argument. You can disagree with me on the facts or the analysis, but at least engage what I'm saying in good faith. I'm extending you that courtesy.
It's different in European welfare states which are big brother societies: you can actually get a reliable census by saying things like "select count(id) from population where alive is true;"
But this is different from proving a certain name didn't appear among the students of a particular university/class, etc; we do know the Rolling Stone story was a hoax.
In fact the editor says the opposite:
“We told her we wouldn’t name her, in large part because we thought she was a sex-assault victim at that time and we don’t name victims of sexual assault without their permission,” said Mike Semel, The Post’s Metro editor. “That agreement for anonymity needs to be considered until we are absolutely certain that there was no assault at all.”
In the OP for this thread, the WaPo only says "aspects of Jackie’s account were not true". I have yet to see a single piece of evidence presented by anyone that no rape occurred.
As for the jury verdict this week, they only ruled that Rolling Stone knowingly omitted facts that would've painted the administration in a better light. They did not rule on the facts of the rape at all.
You are doing the same thing the Rolling Stone writers did: presenting something as fact when the evidence is contradictory.