Kaiserschmarrn wrote:This comment is a bit odd considering what you said in the Roy Moore threat.
This is why the Democrats are failing politically. They've basically moved beyond policy positions into identity politics. So while they have become less relevant in terms of economic issues, they are simultaneously adopting a position fruaght with peril as their own members are guilty of activity they want to use in order to condemn their political opponents. In religion, they call this hypocrisy. In waging a war of ideas, I'd characterize it as a strategic failure.
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:Firstly, the mantra that the victim must be believed and the tolerance (at best) or encouragement (at worst) to conflate any and all allegations as similarly horrific is coming back to bite the left.
Another irony is that it has put people like Tucker Carlson on FoxNews in a morally superior position as he defends people like Al Franken from the anonymous attackers, pointing out the 6th Amendment right to confront an accuser while the Democrats and much of the media adopt the historically indefensible position of believing an accuser
a priori if the accuser is a woman and the charge is related to sex. While it is somewhat off-topic, we've also seen similar instances in race-related debates where a black person vandalizes his/her own car with anti-black rhetoric or posts some anti-black rhetoric in a military dorm to incite outrage and bring down recriminations on whites, only to be discovered that it was not some racist who posted the material (a byproduct of the surveillance state).
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:Secondly, Franken may be a worthwhile sacrifice if this ultimately helps taking down Trump.
It's likely that some are making that calculation--ergo, if Franken must go; then, Trump must go too. However, in the Franken case, it's the picture that does him in, because that will be used against the Democrats. As I said, an adjunct to the notion of hypocrisy is the phrase, "People who live in glass houses should not throw stones." It's amazing that a year after Hillary Clinton was defeated for the presidency, there still isn't much reflection on her own role in her failure.
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:Not sure if the wider moral panic is worth its own thread, so I'm posting this here:
Well that's a good point too. Do we now have to pull Nabakov from the library too? Apparently youth shouldn't be exposed to Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird since it depicts racism in the South in the 1950s, and some people may be horrified by the language used. However, apparently now we need to review Vladimir Nabakov's
Lolita, because Roy Moore might not be a predator, but rather a victim if he read this and decided that dating teenagers was okay. He might have seen Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation, which we may need to re-rate as XXX since it involves a sexual relationship between a middle aged man and a 12 year old girl. Who are the book burners now?
Stormsmith wrote:I don't see Franklin as having the leverage over these women Billy O'Reilly etc had over their staffs, and Franklin was unlikely to be power pushing.
So sexual assault is okay if you aren't employing somebody or working together professionally? Roy Moore wasn't employing anybody either.
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden