Good Ideas

Crockpots are quite versatile - here are some recipe ideas.

This is an interesting counterpoint to the idea of paying your loans off as quickly as possible.  It's something I've thought about (given the current interest rates at below 4%), though having a $1,757/month loan payment is a bit debilitating on a non-biglaw salary.  The amounts that these kids are paying are chump change...

This is a good way to think about being anti-rape and wanting to do something about it, understanding the substantial difficulties in proving rape in court, and nonetheless being dismayed at the holes in the UVA story.  Most people are anti-rape but also pro-truth.  It would be nice if feminist activists realized that about the vast majority of UVA students (or people generally) following this story.

I love how confused everyone is by Andrew Luck's "trash talking."

Responses:

1. That's a nice idea.  I hope that the recipients end up participating (i.e. paying it forward) as well.

2. Oh no!  Make sure bear and penguin bring their emergency parachutes!

3. Does this mean I can get a puppy?  What if I come home and play with him during lunch?

4. It's a nice idea.  I wonder whether social media is doing the job for us, though.

5. What a sad story...  This reminds me of my little brother, though he's not quite there yet.

6. This article hit all the right notes.  I fear that people are more interested in amassing evidence for their position these days than the truth.

R2R:

2. It's like the tail-end of something, with a connotation of said end being in poor shape.  But your point about freedom and security is apt - it's a constant tension, and I think many in our generation have experienced mostly the pitfalls of freedom (e.g. freedom to fail, freedom to take out thousands in loans, freedom of others not to hire you).

3. The problem is that feminists who believe that feminism equals particular choices (as opposed to those who believe that feminism equals choice in general) are dominating the stage right now.  Feminists in the latter category are starting to speak up, though, and that's a good thing.  By the way, I have always contended that having schools trying rape (even if the punishment is just expulsion rather than jail) is a bad idea.  Schools are bad at it, and their motives are either reputational (i.e. they don't want to be known as the rape school, so they suppress and deter women from going through with it) or monetary (i.e. they don't want to lose federal funding for being in violation of Title IX, so they become too eager to convict to show that they're serious about rape).

R2R2R2R2R2R:

The woman who was gang raped 30 years ago wrote about her experience separately.  Based on the article, she tried to pursue criminal charges but UVA questioned the veracity of her claim based on faulty assumptions about why she was seeking to press charges (which is obviously insensitive, prejudicial, and wrong), and then fed her misinformation about jurisdiction (claiming that the Charlottesville Police had none).  Neither issue exists anymore (for all its faults, the new system is accommodating to the victim's concerns and in fact gives her the option (for better or worse) of going to the police), and but for these issues justice may have been served a lot earlier, and perhaps against all of the guilty parties instead of just the one who confessed.  If that's true, then what more do we have to learn from this anecdote?  It seems unlikely to prove that there's a rape culture within frats without more proven incidents like this one, and the issues that we can glean from her story seem to have been addressed at least somewhat successfully.  What is the point of suggesting a "rape culture" based on this story?

B