Friday , March 29 2024

Wasn’t “Nick” just saying “Me Too”?

The debate between Left and Right used to be about economics, now it is about truth. The distinction between objective truth and subjective opinion founded the scientific revolution and was so uncontroversial that it would have been hard fifty or sixty years ago to find anyone who didn’t recognise it as valid. But the Left has been chipping away gradually at the foundation of Western rationality and in places it is crumbling. The result is barbarism.

It is not accidental that it was the Left that championed “Nick”, the fantasist who accused innocent Tories of unspeakable crimes. It followed logically from the frequently expressed Left-wing viewpoint that victims always had to be believed.

There used to be the principle in all cases of criminality that the police would look for objective evidence. If it did not exist or could not be found, then there would be no prima facie case. No one would be charged, no one’s reputation would be ruined.

But somehow this principle was gradually undermined. It began, I think with the idea that there was a special case of crimes, usually involving women victims, where the woman’s opinion had to be believed even if there were no objective evidence for it. The Left in the form of the Feminist movement demanded that women’s viewpoints should count for more than male viewpoints, as if women’s testimony should count for double rather like the inverse of the law in the Middle East. It is obvious that such a way of investigating crime will lead to injustice.

There have been any number of cases where high profile men have had their lives and reputations ruined simply because someone said they did wrong with no other evidence at all. Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault decades earlier. It is obviously impossible to objectively prove what someone did or didn’t do in private twenty or thirty years ago. A case like this would at one time simply have been dismissed as frivolous. Likewise, mere accusation without evidence has been enough to ruin the lives of people like Cliff Richard and Kevin Spacey.

How is anyone supposed to prove what they did or didn’t do decades ago? Yet we have allowed people to be convicted on the basis of mere testimony without any further evidence. Some of these people are no doubt guilty, but how do we know that all of the witnesses were not like “Nick”? People have many reasons to lie. They like the attention. They want compensation. They want revenge. People misremember. Mere opinion should never be raised to the point of “beyond reasonable doubt” unless there is something objective to act as a foundation.

But we systematically undermined the law when we allowed some crimes to become aggravated based merely on opinion. A crime might be described as racist or homophobic simply on the basis that the victim perceived it as such. There need be no other objective evidence. But if a crime can be racist without objective evidence, there is very little preventing the next step of saying that there can be a crime of rape without any objective evidence, or even murder without objective evidence.

The Left has raised mere opinion in certain areas of life to the stage where it has become absolute truth that cannot be questioned. A person born as a boy can at any point in his life simply assert that he feels like a woman and demand that everyone describes him as such. Throughout human history it has been taken as obvious that people were either men or women and that this distinction was an objective fact determined at birth. Now mere subjective opinion in contradistinction with all the objective evidence is enough to determine truth.

We have reached the stage where women who refused to give a bikini wax to a “woman” with male genitalia lost their jobs because of their prejudice. Such “women” have been allowed into women’s prisons, women’s changing rooms and women’s refuges. When you raise the subjective over the objective, you end up losing all sense of what truth is. This is where we are now.

It is a mistake to change the practices of law because of particular, horrible crimes that attract the public’s attention. The murder of a black teenager has meant that some crimes are more equal than others, not because of objective evidence, but because of subjective opinion. Jimmy Saville’s depravity led to a hysterical reaction where decades old testimony was enough to ruin lives. Feminists believe that women should be able to sleep with who they please when they please, but at any time say that what happened in private was rape or sexual assault and be believed automatically.

What happens when you raise mere testimony to the level of truth. You end up with “Nick”. Human nature is such that a proportion of the population will realise that objective evidence is no longer required to convict someone. They will take advantage.

The Labour deputy leader who supported “Nick” and did his very best to use “Nick’s” testimony to destroy the reputation of prominent Tories was following the same principles that are universal on the Left. The victim of certain crimes must always be believed. Objective evidence is no longer needed to determine the truth.  “Nick” is a creature of the Left, he is what happens when we allow Labour to undermine evidence and abolish truth. Why convict “Nick” when he was only saying “Me Too”?

This post was originally published by the author on her personal blog: https://www.effiedeans.com/2019/07/wasnt-nick-just-saying-me-too.html

About Effie Deans

Effie Deans is a pro UK blogger. She spent many years living in Russia and the Soviet Union, but came home to Scotland so as to enjoy living in a multi-party democracy! When not occupied with Scottish politics she writes fiction and thinks about theology, philosophy and Russian literature.

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