Good vid. Best part is 6:55 when Maria says there are no allegations against the president of sexual misconduct. I mean you can’t compare Rapist Franken to potus cuz WE HAVE A PHOTO!

they have espousing that in bfi for months if not years. raise the slightest objection, or god forbid express that certain poor people may actually indeed work hard, and you get labelled and evil stupid lefist and the whole forum runs to atf to whine about your "invasion."

pretty interesting place. unsurprisingly toothsayer is their most celebrated member.

BFI has to be the capitol of the world for mediocre middle aged guys who think their $90k/yr accounting job qualifies them to pontificate about every socioeconomic issue.

Think real ****ing hard on where you're going with this.

LOL

You switching your white knightinh allegiance from ikes to chezlaw is a real brutal retrospective own of ikes, I approve

Lol repubs....lololol Ohio repubs.....




https://mobile.twitter.com/CalebJHul...57981708726272

I'm not going anywhere with it; it's a factual statement that stands on its own.

Never go full Wes Goodman.

lolfly. To refresh your memory, I've always maintained that you and ikes are the same kind of ****ty poster, just different flavors. As it turns out sometimes I agreed with him and sometimes I agree with you. And I know that always has been and will continue to be a shocker to you. Such is life.

Not exactly sure where chez fits in as I never really hung out in 7.0. Just based on all the references to his work I've got a pretty good idea, I suppose.

But whatever narrative you've got going on in your head is almost surely more entertaining. You should post a script or something.

I think the Lena Dunham situation is kind of interesting and relevant

She pretty clearly believes that her friend is 100% innocent. So she says so and gets absolutely lambasted, maybe rightly so because she's previously taken the position that women don't lie about rape.

I think it illustrates the difficulty of Franken's spot. Strong denial that you assaulted/harassed, get attacked. Soft denial + vague apology, look guilty.

Yeah, he pretty clearly can’t say we need to trust women in one breath but then that this woman is a liar in the next. I dunno how that’s hard for people to understand.

For one thing, Franken isn’t calling her a liar.

As Dvault showed, it's a pretty ridiculous stance to take when dealing with anything that could end up in court. The unfortunate part is the **** that happened in the past which led to that slogan needing to be put forward. Although with most of these disclosures happening so long after the events none of this is ever going to end up in a court of law anyway so maybe we can just say screw it and not investigate the stories of the people involved and just have our 5 minutes of hate on the internet.

Relevant here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...-women/545954/

He didn't explicitly call her a liar. But "I support an investigation" is basically an "if true" mentality.

The whole underlying assumption of "it's important to believe women" is that women wouldn't lie as a matter of course.

The photo is pretty clear evidence Franken already treated her in a demeaning fashion. Tweeden says he contrived the skit and then basically took advantage of the situation.

Why don't we simply believe her? His call for an investigation is just a performative, polite, historically common way to call her a liar by implication.

If he didn't do it -- say so. Letting men get away with "uh, sorry so sorry if true" then backpatting them for their restraint almost makes double victims of the women: they get practically no justice and then the entire burden is on them to prove it while the man is applauded for his graceful handling of this potentially slippery woman and her accusations.

Our civic virtues don't have to transport themselves into our private conversations and private behaviors. Al Franken might be innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the law, but I ain't the law, his Senate colleagues ain't the law, the Democratic Party ain't the law, we can draw our own conclusions and he gets no credit from me for his posture here.

Not necessarily. Even if they agree on the events then the way they were perceived at the time is likely to be grossly different. The accuser seems satisfied with Franken calling for an investigation, and says she would be happy to testify in front of the ethics committee. So what's the problem?

Franken wants a public hearing and investigation on his behavior. Seems good? Like, it's possible that he could use that hearing to treat the accuser badly and dismiss the accusations, but that's far from certain. Maybe wait to see how things go?

It's often meant and read as a 'guilty but I'm not going to admit it outright line'.

probably advised by lawyers and PR people among others.

I believe I've expressed a version of something like this before, but I think the tension here is also simply that he's basically saying we should believe her but that also he doesn't think it warrants resigning from the Senate. If that's all true (and he's not aware of any other ****ups in his past destined to come out), then his correct line should probably be like:

1) I behaved badly; she should be believed.
2) I am sorry for my behavior (and I already apologized to her directly)
3) I will be a better person than I was.
4) I am not stepping down, and I thank Ms. Tweeden for her publicly stating that my resignation is not warranted.
5) But I will, of course, support an ethics investigation and abide by the findings or by the recommendations of my Democratic colleagues.

I'm not saying he shouldn't step down, but if he's not planning to, I think the above is the least disingenuous or ham-handed way to act in response to the charge.

Yep. And an ethics investigation and public hearing seems like the ideal way of going through those steps. And it would give the people of Minnesota the information that they need to make the decision of should Al Franken continue to be their senator.

nobody thought to quote this guy?

It's just so bizarre to complain about people saying "if true". Calling it "moral cowardice" to refuse to take a firm position on the accuracy of someone's description of something you didn't witness is ridiculous. People lie about things literally all the time; there's a reason why we don't take every single thing people say at face value. These admonishments that we all act illogically in order to spare some feelings are dumb at best.

Roman Polanski wishes there were more people like you.

You really do think poorly.

This is horrible logic. I'll let others elaborate.

And yet kind of hazy on the question of whether consent is a bright line or a matter of "competing narratives" IIRC? I otherwise agree with 100% of what you wrote in reply to JayTeeMe, though, especially this...

Pretty good Sklansky post here, friends. Unlike DVault I absolutely am accusing people here of having a bad mindset on this issue and of needing to make changes. microbet's stance here seems pretty accommodating toward serious misconduct.

Dr. Modern,

Are you from SMP?

If so, like DS, I know you guys can't handle anything without bright lines, so I'll give you one there: 13 year olds can't consent. Their acceptance of the action before, during, or after doesn't mitigate the crime.

This was not a rape. It's not clear from Leeann's account that there was not consent at the time (there was consent for some kind of a kiss), and her opinion before, during, and after is relevant. (I'm talking about the kiss. I don't think he grabbed her in the photo.)

Also, both of you **** off. The comparison to raping a 13 year old and the suggestion that I would condone it may work out ok in your thought experiments, but in the real world it makes you *******s.

microbet,

I'm an old school politard who got bored of talking about actual poker on here (small stakes limit), though I do have a non-trivial number of SMP posts. I was an ACist for a while, then dramatized my own abandonment of the ideology in favor of a kind of left-libertarianism that acknowledges the inevitability of the state. I owe a lot of the views I've developed here to conversations with Phone Booth. I have strong socialist leanings and favor using tax policy to redress the enormous disparities of wealth and income that exist in the U.S. I'm not sure why you're so mad, tbh.