Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
Judicial philosophy is a key. So is whether a drunken teenage sexual assault occurred, with later false denials. But one other key disqualification has been proven to a moral certainty on national television. And Brett Kavanaugh does not belong in a courtroom.
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:
In his vast conspiracy theory, Whelan not only named his perp, he published contact info for this person, who probably got a factory of hate calls and death threats, Go USA!!1!
Whelan has since shamefacedly deleted his conspiracy theory tweets and apologized profusely, but should still expect to be getting a phone call from the libelled man’s attorneys. I predict a YUGE settlement. But I digress!
Are we caught up?
So, Whelan libelled an innocent man, published his picture, and dox’ed him in a public forum, the question remains: who set the dogs loose to protect Kavanaugh with the strangest of tortured fiction? Let’s Explore!
From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:
I believe the #MeToo movement was a healthy grassroots attempt to highlight and eradicate a serious injustice. But the movement is increasingly being taken over by collectivism, which means that the individual is subordinate to the moral supremacy of the group. Under collectivism, the innocence or guilt of any individual is to be judged not by objective facts but by his group affiliation.
#MeToo is collectivizing into a war on men–all men. Petula Dvorak of the WAPO calls for a “#MeToo March on Washington” this week in one-sided support for Ford ahead of any testimony and prior to the surfacing of relevant facts or proof. Jenna Wortham of the NYT wants “every single man put on notice, to know that they, too, were vulnerable because women were talking.”
This is pure hatred. This is racism. This is collectivism. If “every single man” should fear any woman “talking,” then any man can legitimately be accused of sexual harassment, whether he as an individual is guilty or not. Why not? He’s a man. He’s guilty no matter the actual facts of any individual case, because men as a group are guilty.
From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:
Woodward paints the Trump White House as being filled with chaos, dysfunction, and paranoia. He portrays the administration as being in a “nervous breakdown” and quotes numerous staffers as having a negative opinion of Trump. A notable example is how Chief of Staff John Kelly said, “He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.” Trump is shown to be disparaging of his staff. He told Wilbur Ross, the man he picked to be his Commerce Secretary, that “you’re past your prime.” He has also called his Attorney General Jeff Sessions, another man he picked, “mentally retarded” and “he’s this dumb southerner.”
Staffers seem to be constantly ill at ease and looking over their shoulders. They are reportedly petrified that they will be quoted by former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman in her book Unhinged as aying something Trump would not like. This seems to coincide with accounts given in many other books, especially Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury.
From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:
Mitch McConnell, Russia’s dubiously-useful idiot Donald Trump, and yep, even pore ole alleged incel until he was shockingly past high school Brett Kavanaugh, who somehow thinks talking about the activity of his junk post secondary school absolves him of any weirdness (as if penetration was the only kind of abuse!) all probably need some down-low smacking where it will hurt and count.
And that down-low smack goes to anybody who wants to know where this thing went so wrong and why people are talking about their personal business (protesters of Kavanaugh are telling Congressional aides the stories of their assaults, the time they also realized they were Me Too) while they protest this latest outrageous degradation of norms and propriety.
Trump and McConnell and any number of RW spokesfolks can claim Kavanaugh is a “fine man”. I don’t know what their definition of fine man is, though. Copacetic? Role-knowing? See, I remember the 2004 election, when John Kerry was what many of us libs would call a fine man, and he was Swift-boated by the same folks who called Obama a Kenyan and a Muslim.
From John Pavlovitz:
I’ve served as a pastor and caregiver for the past twenty-five years, much of that working with teenagers who’ve walked through the private hell that all survivors of assault go through.
And in the past few days, I’ve seen every single familiar cruelty hurled at Dr. Ford: victim blaming, public shaming, privacy invasion, vile insults lobbed from a distance, collateral damage to loved ones.
This is the reason victims often tell me they stay imprisoned in silence: because as painful as it is to suffer alone and inside your head, sometimes for decades—it often pales in comparison to the violence you experience if you dare to speak your truth.
The percentage of false abuse claims is so incredibly low for a reason—because survivors invariably lose so much by speaking.
There is almost no upside to claiming violation, no winning in exposing your pain to strangers, no reward for showing your scars.
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:
Questions pushed opened the door, and once it was open, I was free to wander and roam; free to read whatever I wanted; free to have non-Christian friends; free to love the world and the things of the world; free to finally, for myself, choose whether I wanted to be an Evangelical or whether I wanted to be a Christian. And the choice I made, of course, was NO, I don’t want to be an Evangelical; I don’t want to be a Christian. But even here I have to admit that, to some degree, this choice was forced upon me. I could have ignored the voices in my head and remained a Christian, but I chose, instead, to listen to questions and challenges percolating in my mind as I, for the first time, looked at Christianity with a skeptical, critical eye. And once I dared to accept the full weight of the implications of what I learned, my house of faith came tumbling down.
I have spent the last decade building a new house, one that sits on a foundation of reason, freethought, and the humanistic ideal. I didn’t choose to become an Evangelical. But I have now chosen to become a humanist. I feel liberated from the bondage of past beliefs, and while humanism is not the end-all Christianity professes to be, it does provide me a solid moral and ethical foundation by which to live my life. And here’s the good news, I am free to change and adapt as my thinking evolves, and no one is going to threaten me with humanist hell if I do. I can’t begin to express how wonderful it is to to ponder and think about what we call the big issues of life without fearing that I have offended the God or one of his earthly messengers. Simply put, I am free to be me.
From nojo at Stinque:
We have been here before, of course. We have been here many times in the past year, and the story always involves power, and the lengths to which people will go to achieve and sustain it.
And if that were the entire story, we could understand it, the corruption of the individual, the stuff of novels and movies. But the real story is never about one person; it is always about the infrastructure of power, the aiders and abettors, people whose silence can be bought, people whose fear keeps them silent, people whose own power depends on staying in line.
This is how you get rape apologists.
This is also how you get traitors.
And this we understand as well, these networks of corruption, this cancer on the body politic. The lies, the deceit, the psychopathic cynicism, all this is understandable, human nature being what it is, power being what it is. People are assholes. We get that.
We mention the past year, because this is the story of the past year, as well as a generation ago. The power is the same, what people will do in possession of unaccountable power is the same: They will try to get away with it. Always have, always will.
But what makes this unlike stories from the past year, and more like the story from a generation ago, is that people do get away with it. The evil is not vanquished.
From PZ Myers:
He may have joined a cult.
He’s the new executive director for a shiny new organization, Transformative Humanists of America, which may not be so new: their web pages sometimes refer to themselves as humanist.com, which seems to be some kind of generic humanist forum. But they’ve gotten together and put together a nearly unreadable mass of words. I’m not sure what they’re all about, but what they seem to consider their main selling point is their mediocrity.
Society is fracturing at an alarming rate with the right hemorrhaging integrity while the Left is cannibalizing itself. As a result the majority middle is increasingly apathetic, disillusioned and without a home. Most people are good, which means suffering is increasing at our own hand. Transformative Humanism can and will help reunify society so we can get back to the business of the Greater Good.
They’ve got a whole section on the Extremism Horseshoe. Yup. Horseshoe theory again. The idea that the left is just as evil as the right, but those who straddle the fence are the best people. Politics are just the worst.