Ann Coulter gets a bad rap, I think. She is a demagogue, a dirty-pool artist, a Menckenesque presence in the public prints. But she is not a rhetor, a champion of pure debate. Rather, she is a satirist, and she is damn good at it. The shrieking she incites seems like so much group-glowering to me, whipped up, I expect, by people who know that a chorus of grievances, no matter how loud or plaintive, is not an argument.
Tonight she brings us a problem near-omnipresent video can easily solve: False accusations of rape:
Having showcased Jones’ original, false accusation in a 1,500-word article splashed across its front page, as soon as her story unraveled, the Times stared at its shoes and said nothing. In another six months, liberals will once again be citing Jones’ case as evidence of the “troubling trend” of sexual assaults among military contractors.
If only Jones had accused Bill Clinton or any member of the Kennedy family of rape, the mainstream media might have treated her allegations with a little more skepticism. But she accused employees of a company with a tertiary, long-ago, six-degrees-of-separation relationship with Dick Cheney. This was no time for journalistic integrity.
Still, wasn’t it the tiniest bit suspicious that Jones claimed KBR management responded to her rape claim by locking her in a shipping container?
Why would a company that already had a PR problem stick its neck out to protect accused rapists? Isn’t it more likely that a corporation would sell out even innocent employees accused of rape? Wouldn’t it have occurred to them that she’d eventually get back to the U.S.?
None of this could happen if there were video cameras everywhere and on everyone, and if the captured video were stored forever. No need for visual interpretation or database mining. Just a permanent record of everything that happens, for anyone to view in real time or review later. This is the omniscience we have always wanted from our gods, the irrefutable information necessary to correct injustices. But by making it an omni-omniscience — everyone has the capacity to observe anything they want to see — we can “correct” most injustices by avoiding them altogether.
Damn! Am I completely frolicked up, or is what I am proposing amazingly better than the dispute-resolution system we have now? I’m not talking about replacing the whole Rube Goldberg contraption — not here, not now, not with this technology — so you won’t get anarchist cooties from thinking about this. But: Wow…
Brian Brady says:
Wait a minute…this is totally off-topic but another Jones DID accuse Clinton of sexual harassment, which led to a Penthouse deal, for which Coulter denounced the other Jones as “trailer-park trash”.
Oh, the 90s! Back then, Al Franken wrote SNL skits about drugging and date raping Leslie Stahl.
Is it just me or did the linked story seem awfully surreal?
August 3, 2011 — 8:21 pm
Al Lorenz says:
For every measure, like a camera, there is a countermeasure. Search “invisibility” on Google.
Absolute accountability has tremendous appeal, as Greg has eloquently described. A camera is just not impossible to fool. In the future, it will be even easier.
August 4, 2011 — 3:46 pm