“Virtually all of what is referred to as main stream media” does not include Fox News, the largest of the cable-based television news channels? Or does Fox News “tilt left”?
Seriously? To avoid confusion in the future, I should note that virtually is an adverb meaning nearly, or mostly. Had I meant to include all popular news sources it is likely I would have written something like “All popular news sources”.
I read the link because I like to read different points of view.
The article has some good and bad to it.
I am tired of talking about some of this stuff.
As I wrote in another thread, yeah the accused can be drunk during the act.
But many of these guys who are drunk during the act were not drunk when they planned the act and or were happy when they sobered up after the act.
It is very likely that the author withheld the name of the individual for precisely this reason.
For the record, you could also add the phrase “Yippe Ki Yea” to the end of each sentence and it wouldn’t change the tone “much”. It also wouldn’t make the guy Bruce Willis.
@ucbalumnus, when you are so far to the right, everything else looks left.
@palm715: I think that changes the writer’s tone dramatically, though I agree that there’s no way to verify whether the writer is in fact a detective (a common issue with anonymous letters).
Whether a detective or not, his (I presume, although again we have no basis for determining gender) points about proof in general sexual assault cases mirror my own experiences in working in criminal law. Acquaintance rape, in my experience, commonly involves alcohol and usually is a fight over whether the sex was consensual. Often there will be some sex acts that were claimed consensual but that others that weren’t. (I have only worked on one stranger rape case, and it was in the context of a teacher/student long term affair.)
You may be interested to know that not only sexual assault suffers from this problem. I dealt with several cases of things like drunk driving or theft where the accused was so drunk/high they had no recollection of the events in question. The difference is that in those cases the police has physical evidence–stolen property, BAC records/field sobriety tests–and sex crimes usually come down to consent. I’m not really sure how one would go about designing a system that met constitutional requirements while also catching more criminals.
I definitely have the perception that binge drinking is a lot heavier now.
In college in California in the 70’s I did not see many people ever get blithering drunk. I went to some pretty big parties in Hollywood (not the rich person’s Hollywood) and pot was as or more prevalent than booze. Beach parties featured a fair amount of beer, but not to crazy levels. I never saw cocaine being used, or pills. I heard rumors of some wild hook-ups at/after concerts, but nothing more than rumors. There was definitely a huge hook-up culture within the younger gay community; this was pre-AIDS.
And a remarkable number of students have been written up for Minor-in-Possession tickets or suspended for being under the influence of alcohol at school events. It seems like a lot more, but perhaps it is that it is being enforced now, and wasn’t then.
The binge drinking worries me. It is both a physical danger and a risk that keeps people from being able to protect themselves.
I sure did but I was in NYC not Hollywood (I doubt there was much difference). Not until around 1982, though that was partly a function of my age combined with the increase of availability then. I think coke imports double each year from 1978 or so on into the 80s.
Sure saw plenty of pills too, some that don’t seem to exist anymore (quaaludes and microdots, just offhand).
Here’s the thing about memories. Almost always, when an experience is more good than bad, we remember only the good over time.
Binge drinking has gone DOWN.
http://www.monitoringthefuture.org//pubs/monographs/mtf-vol2_2014.pdf
I went to college in the '80’s. I’m pretty straight-laced as these things go, and didn’t personally witness a lot because that wasn’t how I rolled, but of course there was binge drinking, and of course there were hook-ups (though we called them one-night stands), and of course there was pot and cocaine and I’m sure other drugs.
I also went to school in the late 70’s and early 80’s and there was definitely binge drinking, especially with 18 year olds being legal. There was also pot and cocaine, not the prescription drugs or heroin like there is now. A difference I see between then and now is the lack of a dating culture. Back then, we had dates. I remember getting very drunk and my boyfriend/ now husband made sure I got home ok. I have 2 DD’s, 21 and 18, and I can count the number of dates for both of them on 1 hand. Today, the girls go out as a group, the group leaves one behind and then something bad happens. Maybe I’m just old fashioned but having a date or a friend that won’t leave you is a good thing.
I hope the percentage of binge drinkers college age is declining, it would not be surprising to see a parallel decline is sexual assault reports…but this is a scary statistic from the CDC about college students that do drink.
The citations and research is here;
http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/binge-drinking.htm
I want to college in the late 80’s and there weren’t a whole lot of people who went on " dates" in my social circle. It was a small school where almost everyone lived on campus. No Greek life. Basically, people socialized at dorm parties. A couple might hang out at a few parties together, or study together, ir whatever and eventually become a couple. And sex could happen various points in that process.
But a date in the sense of “Hey, would you like to go to a movie Friday?” “Great, I’ll pick you up at 8.” Yeah, that wasn’t the norm. Maybe mostly because so much socializing was on campus so it was easier to just run into people casually.
I went to college in the late 80’s. I was not into partying, so I didn’t see much at all. But I know that, at least at my school, Thursday was not a party night. No profs were rearranging schedules to avoid having classes on Fridays, as apparently they do now. I wonder when Thursday became a party night. Any correlation to when big college football games started being televised and hyped on Thursdays? Maybe it’s all ESPN’s fault 
(yes, I’m kidding, but there may be a correlation there…).
I don’t understand the “drink to get so drunk you black out” mentality … it’s incredibly childish and stupid and quite honestly, I have a really hard time having any respect for people who do. I felt the same way in college. They obviously don’t respect themselves or anyone else around them (because yes, them being falling down drunk does affect people around them … when they throw up in the hallway, or stumble into the path of an oncoming car, or pass out on the sidewalk). As someone said in a post on the other thread, somehow we need to shame this behavior to the point it becomes socially unacceptable. How to do that is what we obviously haven’t figured out yet … and I’m not sure how you do that when the whole concept of shame seems to have been lost in our society. Stop and think – what, in our society, carries any shame or stigma with it as far as college students are concerned? Or even larger society for that matter?
The drinking culture varies from school to school. I remember visiting friends at UW Madison in the 80’s and being astounded at the amount of heavy drinking. Lots of drunks stumbling about including a girl in a short skirt passed out on a snow bank. This was around 9:30 before any serious drinking usually started.
I went to college in the early first half of the 80s and it wasn’t a big party school but Thursday was a party night. Everyone went to the bar part of the student center for pitchers of cheap beer and pizza and games of quarters. Later there was usually dancing. People didn’t pregame hard alcohol, though, and I only remember 1 time in my college years where someone on my decent sized campus needed medical treatment for alcohol. It wasn’t a weekly event.
I went to a huge party school. Graduated in 2013. No professor rearranged classes because of thirsty Thursday. In fact, the few times I had tests in classes (just didn’t take a lot of test-based classes), they were normally on Fridays
Besides, class schedules are set by the university, not the professor. Any professor who routinely skips Friday classes should be fired. I don’t know of any.
" I remember visiting friends at UW Madison in the 80’s and being astounded at the amount of heavy drinking. Lots of drunks stumbling about including a girl in a short skirt passed out on a snow bank. This was around 9:30 before any serious drinking usually started."
I too did 2 walkouts to UW Madison (1983 and 1984) and it was soooo much wilder than NU in terms of drinking. There was just no comparison. It was a zoo. I’m ok with relatively sedate.
I guess it depends on the school, but DS has signed up for classes for which the published schedule was M, W at one time, and Th at another. That never happened when I was in school … classes were MWF or T/Th. So in some cases profs have input in creating the timetable of classes from the get-go.
@romanigypsyeyes – from looking at that paper, it seems that the earliest college data is from 1980. My experience was from much earlier in the 70’s. Maybe I was oblivious (though I lived directly behind fraternity row) but I just didn’t see binge drinking the way I see it living near a college campus today. Though now I’m about five blocks from fraternity row rather than looking down on their backyards.