What? Where? Are you seeing some secret version of this post that the rest of us don’t?

Comparing Mychal Bell, a 17 year old thug who after three or four convictions of assault gets tried as an adult to the Duke LaCross team?

We can argue if Mychal Bell needs to be locked up for 20 years or if we can find a better way to straiten the kid out. The guy had 4 previous strikes. The young man needs to figure out better ways to deal with life than beating on people. He had 4 chances to figure this out, he screwed up why give him 5, because he beat on a white kid?

I couldn’t agree more.

While we We don’t have a very long tradition of middle to upper class white males being victimized by the justice system., I do think we have a 30 year tradition, if not longer, of victimizing males regardless of race by the justice system, especially when it comes to child custody, domestic violence, false allegations of rape, and sexual harassment.

Various feminist and other so called liberal bloggers (Amanda Marcotte, and I believe even Scott Lemieux) long claimed that Duke was an exception to push their agenda that in actuality what Duke shows was that false allegations are rare, that men can get away with rape and even that these students lives were not ruined by what they went through.

I think what Duke shows is how corrupt prosecutors can be for all sorts of reasons. Nifong did this because he wanted to get elected because he wanted a pension. The media did this because they had a hot story. The Duke 88 did this because it fit into their agendas and stereotypes.

I would never claim that African Americans and other American minorities don’t face a lot of systemic biases on a day to day basis.

But I don’t think that Duke was such an exception that it means we can treat it as an outlier and ignore it.

It is indeed sad that it took Duke and the resources of these students and possibly even their skin color to finally break through to some people to show how many prosecutors game the system.