RIP Kobe

Sports & Other Games
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My interpretation is that it sounds an awful lot like she had sex within a 48 hour window and the defense wants it to be 24 hours after and the prosecution wants it to be 24 hours before, and frankly I don’t care which it was, nor do I care how many people she had sex with in the first place - other than to the extent that it impacts the likelihood that her injuries were caused by a rape.

Like, various people are arguing various points of the case with me, which is putting me in a position to make the argument that his defense made, which is not really what I set out to be doing.

Getting back to my main point here: you list all the facts in one place in a neutral light, and it is clear to me that you can create a lot of narratives by picking and choosing which ones to focus on. People in this thread keep taking the ones that look the worst for him, putting them in the worst light for him, and pushing those.

I tried to push back toward neutral on those, and I’ve tried to avoid arguing his side too much, but I keep getting drawn into those arguments.

My stance is not that he’s innocent. My stance is not that he didn’t make mistakes. He clearly made a bunch of mistakes. My stance is not that he couldn’t have raped her, nor that it’s unlikely he raped her. My stance is that we don’t know, and that the two most likely things would be that he raped her on purpose or a miscommunication that led to her having revoked consent and him having failed to understand that - it’s on him, but it’s not an intentional violent rape.

That’s it. A few people here want to make it out to be 100% that he did the worst possible thing given the facts, and I think that’s unfair and an inaccurate portrayal of the facts. To me the argument would be more like “Was it 70% likely that there was a miscommunication or 30%?”

But, even on that, I don’t care. Either way he did something bad, it’s a matter of degrees. Settling on some % of probability doesn’t change her reality at all, and it doesn’t do much for anyone else. Call it 90/10, for all I care, I just don’t think that he should be judged 100% for something he is not 100% likely to have done. I think any reasonable likelihood that he didn’t do the worst possible thing here is pretty substantial and has a pretty big impact on how he is/should be remembered.

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I’m going to step out of this thread for now. I don’t think I can make my points or illustrate my positions much more clearly than I did in the last two posts, hopefully people see what I was and was not getting at. Any more arguments will be either circular or just snarky insults, and that doesn’t do anyone any good. If someone advances the discussion in a direction that makes me think productive discussion can be had, I’ll pop back in.

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Ok. I just want to make a point that I think your very clearly articulated positions are fucking horrible and embarrassing.

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wtf did I just read

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I suggest the Kobe stuff be transferred to its own thread.

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“Sports - A Thread For Pettifogging”?

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Ok, that made me laugh.

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I won’t lie. I am currently engaging in a Twitter war because I insist on bringing up Kobe’s legacy of rape.

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This is the exact moment to have it because people are wrong. I see it as being the same as talking about gun control in the hours after a school shooting.

This isn’t edge-lording for me. This is about striking back at the culture of rape that allows someone like Donald Trump to be normalized. And I get that this strikes a nerve and that some people might find it counter-productive, but this is what I am. This is authentically me, criticizing the same sort of myth-building process that the establishment uses to work against criticism of the police or military.

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You do realize that the rehabilitation of Kobe’s public image was a major PR campaign trying to burnish his personal brand, right?

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I’m not saying you can’t be sad about his family. Just don’t ignore the bad stuff.

When Michael Jackson died, were we supposed to focus on his music and ignore the kiddy diddling? Did you only remember a smiling Kirby Puckett and not his history of domestic violence?

Maybe y’all think I’m being harsh here, but I think the people who want to go easy on Kobe are kind of like Brock Turner’s judge. You make it easier to understand how there can be Paterno apologists.

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I suppose you’ve completely forgiven William Kennedy Smith because of his work against landmines.

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They can’t if they are Republicans…

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I’m just imagining you writing the same thing with the names and relevant details changed the day after Michael Jackson died.

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I think we should just be glad he was caught the first time he made a mistake and learned his lesson from it and never mistreated anyone ever again…

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That or he started buying diamond rings for his victims instead of his wife.

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You’re ridiculous. How many women do you need to come forward to say someone is a rapist before you think a rape occurred? How did you feel when Brett Kavanaugh only had one accuser? Is Al Franken still okay because he hasn’t hit double digits? How many reports before you turned against Bill Cosby?

Kobe just learned to pay before instead of after and that it is cheaper to ask permission instead of forgiveness.

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You should masturbate.

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Feels like you’re saying that maybe it was technically rape, but it probably wasn’t “rape-rape”, so it’s not that bad.