U.S. Politics

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, LakotaDakota said:

It more just the celeb hysteria and politicized instant guilt that i don't like. Not a leftie luvvie then you're guilty regardless.

Do you think any of this would have happened if Obama had nominated him?

No, I imagine Fox News and the GOP would have left it completely unmentioned if an Obama nominee had been accused of rape *rolleyes.gif*

[VILLAMARV]

6 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

credibly accused of sexual assault.

To be fair we have no idea how credible the accusations themselves are.
 

 

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, VILLAMARV said:

To be fair we have no idea how credible the accusations themselves are.
 

 

I strongly disagree. There are a wide variety of indicators of how credible the allegations are, including but not limited to - the Republican congress agreeing to hold hearings at which they were discussed, Republican politicians repeatedly insisting that she was a 'credible witness', and the fact that she was able to identify three of his close friends 36 years later. 

Perhaps you mean 'accurate' or 'truthful', but credibility is demonstrated by the fact these allegations were taken seriously enough to hold a hearing and a further FBI investigation over. 

[VILLAMARV]

1 minute ago, HanoiVillan said:

I strongly disagree. There are a wide variety of indicators of how credible the allegations are, including but not limited to - the Republican congress agreeing to hold hearings at which they were discussed, Republican politicians repeatedly insisting that she was a 'credible witness', and the fact that she was able to identify three of his close friends 36 years later. 

Perhaps you mean 'accurate' or 'truthful', but credibility is demonstrated by the fact these allegations were taken seriously enough to hold a hearing and a further FBI investigation over. 

Maybe pick this up later, Bruce just got sacked

[peterms]

5 hours ago, VILLAMARV said:

To be fair we have no idea how credible the accusations themselves are.
 

 

Quite apart from the accusations, I would have thought his attitude and behaviour during the hearing suggest he would be completely unsuited to a role where calm, fair, reasoned, objective judgement is supposed to be a core requirement.  He comes across as a partisan, lying, entitled, supercilious, over-emotional, self-pitying little shit with no sense of what the office requires.  I wouldn't employ him as a tea boy, nor trust him to put the bins out.

[peterms]

Even this most loyal apparatchik can't hide her utter embarrassment at being asked to explain this away.

 

[VILLAMARV]

18 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

I strongly disagree. There are a wide variety of indicators of how credible the allegations are, including but not limited to - the Republican congress agreeing to hold hearings at which they were discussed, Republican politicians repeatedly insisting that she was a 'credible witness', and the fact that she was able to identify three of his close friends 36 years later. 

Perhaps you mean 'accurate' or 'truthful', but credibility is demonstrated by the fact these allegations were taken seriously enough to hold a hearing and a further FBI investigation over. 

Perhaps I do, for a word that can mean anything from validity to believability though I believe the point is still valid. She was undoubtedly a 'credible witness' overall imo and most definitely in comparison to Kavanaugh. I wasn't suggesting otherwise. (and already said as much in this thread)

The accusations themselves though, of sexual assault and attempted rape, have seemingly been investigated (Who does this on behalf of the committee idk) and turned up a statement from the other accused party of having no memory of the incident and the other named witnesses of also having no memory of the incident. Leaving the credibility scale in my head going something like

She was a credible witness.
He was not a credible witness.
We have no idea how credible the assault allegations are.
There is no credible case to be brought here without corroborative evidence.

But then as you say maybe I'm talking about credible as in truthful, indubitable and so on when you're using it as credible as in believable, worthy of credence and so on. There is an inherent vagueness to the term imo. It's the job of Law Enforcement to ascertain the credibility of her accusations (In terms of validity), not 12 politicians sat round a bench, not the assembled media and certainly not us sat at home without the evidence in front of us. However stupid and abhorrent the accused is.

Objectively - He was accused by a credible witness. I just don't see how any of us can know how credible the accusations are. I don't think they're the same thing.

Subjectively - I believed her more than I did him.

In short, It's not you, or your point in the OP, it's the term 'credibly accused' where 'accused' should suffice. 'falsely accused' used to be the qualifying factor after the facts were known. I'm not sure why this term exists in the middle ground other than to imply guilt.

[blandy]

34 minutes ago, VILLAMARV said:

He was accused by a credible witness. I just don't see how any of us can know how credible the accusations are. I don't think they're the same thing.

I read a thing about this the other day. Here's an extract.

Quote

....At least as I read it, though it pains me to say so, the evidence before us leans toward Ford. Let’s consider the balance sheet carefully.

On one side of the ledger, Ford is wholly credible. Yes, her story has holes. The location of the event is unclear in her memory, as is—importantly—how she got home and what happened after she left the house in question. Yet few observers seem to dispute her credibility. Not even Kavanaugh and his supporters contend that she is lying or making up the incident in question, merely that she is mistaken as to his involvement in it.

Her story is certainly plausible, and certain details she offers lend it additional credibility. She correctly identifies, for example, a social circle that appears actually to have existed around Kavanaugh during the summer in question. A fabulist likely would not know, for example, of Kavanaugh’s friendship with Mark Judge and their propensity to drink beer together in the relevant period with other individuals she named. While Kavanaugh said he didn’t recall meeting Ford but that it was possible they had interacted, it seems overwhelmingly likely that her claim to have known him and his circle socially while the two were in high school is true.

While Ford can offer no contemporaneous corroboration of her story in the form of testimony from people who remember being present at the alleged event, her story is not wholly uncorroborated either. She appears to have told her therapist about the alleged event years ago, and she identified Kavanaugh as her attacker to her husband years ago, as well.

 

She initially raised the allegation with her congresswoman before Kavanaugh’s nomination took place. At a minimum, it seems quite clear that Ford was genuinely part of the world in which she claims the attack took place and that she genuinely believed—long before Trump’s election, let alone Kavanaugh’s nomination—that Kavanaugh attacked her.

That she believes this story sincerely is corroborated, if only weakly, by her polygraph exam. Polygraphs are not especially reliable, but the willingness to take one can be a show of strength in a witness. The polygraph is not evidence that Kavanaugh attacked Ford. It is evidence that Ford believes her story truthful and is an earnest accuser, not a conspirator.

Her story is also corroborated, imperfectly but perceptibly, by Kavanaugh’s high-school calendar. Ford describes the attack as taking place at a gathering at which at least four boys—Kavanaugh, Judge, Patrick (P.J.) Smythe, and a boy whose name Ford could not remember—and one girl, Leland Keyser, were drinking beer. Ford specifically allowed for the possibility that there might have been others present as well.

Kavanaugh’s calendar entry for the evening of July 1, 1982, contains an entry that reads, “Go to Timmy’s for skis with Judge, Tom, P.J., Bernie and Squi.” In the hearing, Kavanaugh acknowledged that “skis” in this entry referred to “brewskis,” or beer; that P.J. was Smythe; that Judge was Mark Judge; and that “Squi” was a boy who, Ford had earlier testified, just happened to have been someone she “went out with” for a short time. The calendar entry does not include Ford or Keyser, so the corroboration is far from perfect. It also includes people not mentioned by Ford. Then again, the degree of overlap with Ford’s story is striking. In the summer in which Ford alleges that Kavanaugh attacked her at an evening get-together with a small group of boys drinking beers, his calendar identifies an evening get-together with a small group of boys drinking beers, including three of the boys named by Ford, along with one she dated. Why exactly Kavanaugh imagines his calendar entries to be powerfully exculpatory I am really not sure.

Ford’s story also finds some degree of corroboration in Mark Judge’s employment history. Ford claims that she saw Judge some weeks after the alleged attack at the Safeway where he worked and that he was visibly uncomfortable seeing her. The Washington Post verified from Judge’s own memoir that he was, in fact, working at a grocery story as a bagger in the relevant period. Assuming the FBI investigation firms that up, it would offer another data point tending to corroborate her account’s consistency with verifiable facts.

On the other side of the ledger is Kavanaugh’s testimony, and here we cannot be quite so confident that the witness was being candid....

 

[VILLAMARV]

19 hours ago, peterms said:

Quite apart from the accusations, I would have thought his attitude and behaviour during the hearing suggest he would be completely unsuited to a role where calm, fair, reasoned, objective judgement is supposed to be a core requirement.  He comes across as a partisan, lying, entitled, supercilious, over-emotional, self-pitying little shit with no sense of what the office requires.  I wouldn't employ him as a tea boy, nor trust him to put the bins out.

No argument there. The guys a lying scumbag of a higher order than most given his role in Bush era torture stuff and the 911 fallout (He wanted to cap money received by victims IIRC), stopping the re-count in Florida and so on. A horrible human being. Once described as the 'Forrest Gump of the Republicans' I believe. I'm guessing they weren't going for a 'likeable' reference there. He was involved in the Vince Foster case and was the principle author of the Starr Report into the Bill Clinton Presidency (Presumably where the Clinton jibe came from the other day). Had some involvement with the Enron Task Force (Can't find much on that), tried to stop Cuban boys going home to their fathers and all sorts. Every single Partisan Right-Wing thing in America in the last 20 years he has been front and centre it seems. If not driving it through Legislatively.

I would love to find out what bits of the Patriot Act are his doing (and when he is confirmed I suspect we may get to find out).......Anyway, here's me last week.

On 28/09/2018 at 12:14, VILLAMARV said:

Kavanaugh appeared evasive, belligerent, manipulative and at times not credible.

The same post that quote is from contains the bit where I'm agreeing with another poster that I think he's guilty as sin. I feel my personal views on him are well stated at this point. I found his performance laughable.

I don't know why people are seemingly assuming I'm defending him.

[peterms]

1 hour ago, VILLAMARV said:

The same post that quote is from contains the bit where I'm agreeing with another poster that I think he's guilty as sin. I feel my personal views on him are well stated at this point. I found his performance laughable.

I don't know why people are seemingly assuming I'm defending him.

The whole issue with the accusations is difficult.  She's credible, he's clearly lied about some aspects of the past and is therefore not to be believed on other things (which doesn't mean he must be disbelieved, more that people should have a much greater level of doubt about what he says), there's no actual evidence...the attempted rape probably falls short of "beyond reasonable doubt", but as several people have pointed out, it's not a criminal trial but a decision to appoint to a lifetime job of very great power supposedly requiring the postholder to be credible, trustworthy, and respected.  It's not a case of proving a criminal act, just forming a judgement on suitability for an important role.

I don't take you to be defending him, and it's certainly possible that the allegations are false.  But as the article Blandy linked underlines, the decision to appoint doesn't need to hinge on whether the allegation is true - he's plainly unsuitable on other grounds anyway.

[StefanAVFC]

4 hours ago, VILLAMARV said:

have seemingly been investigated (Who does this on behalf of the committee idk)

The FBI, at the direction of the Whitehouse who blocked the FBI from interviewing even Ford or Kavanaugh...

[chrisp65]

I think with the exception of Villamarv, we're all on the right side here.

 

 

[VILLAMARV]

1 minute ago, chrisp65 said:

I think with the exception of Villamarv, we're all on the right side here.

Of what exactly?

[VILLAMARV]

I find the term 'credibly accused' a bit newspeak-y. I can agree to disagree on that, but I've explained why I think that.

What else is being inferred?

[chrisp65]

6 minutes ago, VILLAMARV said:

Of what exactly?

I was just trying to do a funny

[VILLAMARV]

16 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

I was just trying to do a funny

Ah, a wing joke eh. I've said before I prefer the circular spectrum.

That way I can call myself a Liberal Anarchist and be diametrically opposed to myself.

[peterms]

The Cruelty Is the Point

Quote

The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.

The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.

Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.

Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.

Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.

This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

A blockbuster New York Times investigation on Tuesday reported that President Trump’s wealth was largely inherited through fraudulent schemes, that he became a millionaire while still a child, and that his fortune persists in spite of his fumbling entrepreneurship, not because of it. The stories are not unconnected. The president and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the nation’s darkest impulses in the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get away with this fraud is tied to cruelty.

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

 

[VILLAMARV]

1 hour ago, StefanAVFC said:

The FBI, at the direction of the Whitehouse who blocked the FBI from interviewing even Ford or Kavanaugh...

Is that the one they've done in this last week? I was wondering about the one before the hearing thing we watched the other day that Grassley kept referring to. (between his mouthfuls of peanuts obviously)

 

[VILLAMARV]

3 hours ago, peterms said:

The whole issue with the accusations is difficult.  She's credible, he's clearly lied about some aspects of the past and is therefore not to be believed on other things (which doesn't mean he must be disbelieved, more that people should have a much greater level of doubt about what he says), there's no actual evidence...the attempted rape probably falls short of "beyond reasonable doubt", but as several people have pointed out, it's not a criminal trial but a decision to appoint to a lifetime job of very great power supposedly requiring the postholder to be credible, trustworthy, and respected.  It's not a case of proving a criminal act, just forming a judgement on suitability for an important role.

I don't take you to be defending him, and it's certainly possible that the allegations are false.  But as the article Blandy linked underlines, the decision to appoint doesn't need to hinge on whether the allegation is true - he's plainly unsuitable on other grounds anyway.

Again, I agree. Again I have already said as much in this thread.

On 28/09/2018 at 12:14, VILLAMARV said:

Don't misunderstand me it's 100% in the US public interest to know and surely the people voting on the appointment of the Judge should have this information and indeed act upon it if they see fit.

Or at least lent my likes to things I agreed with that made my point better than myself. Some of which were your own posts. Although OBE summed it up well I thought.

On 28/09/2018 at 16:46, OutByEaster? said:

The positive in this is that across the US there has been a spike in reporting of sexual assaults, Ford's legacy is that young women who find themselves in the situation she was in will feel more confident in going immediately to the right authorities. That confidence is too late for her - if she'd been able to report this in the 80's we might be in a different place now - we're not.

There's no evidence that Kavanaugh committed an assault on her, no prosecutor would take it to court, there's just nothing but the accusation - now I don't like him, I hope very much he doesn't make it to the Supreme Court - but I think that whilst there are a million good reasons to keep him from that position - an (unfortunately) unproven accusation shouldn't be one of them. Whilst I found her to be a credible witness, I think there's a danger in proclaiming guilt and sentence (in this case, the sentence of non-career progression) without evidence - it's evidence that should decide - not the degree to which the accused looks like just the sort. 

There's no clean end to this - Kavanaugh is the opposite of what I'd like on the Supreme Court, but he's what America picked. Ford may well have been the victim of a sexual assault, but the society and the times meant that she wasn't able to report it at a time it could have made a difference. It's a lot of good principles in opposition to each other - women should be safe from predatory men, people should be innocent until proven guilty, the best and most honest should sit in judgement in our courts. 

This spectacle will hopefully change the culture of reporting sexual assault in the US. Unfortunately, I don't think it will help Dr Ford or stop Mr Kavanaugh.

So in summary, a man who brought a case on the President against sexual assault charges is accused of sexual assault while waiting confirmation on a post he was nominated for by a new President with 20odd various sexual assault charges levied against him.

i.e. it's not going to make a blind bit of difference.

[VILLAMARV]

Surely the question is why? Why are the Senate going to vote (looking likely to) for a man who lied in front of the world for a position on the Supreme Court? Why is Trump constantly picking Bush cronies for positions of power and influence? (Off the top of my head, Kavanaugh, Bolton, Gina Haspel to name but 3) Why limit the scope of the FBI investigation? (Especially with the FISA stuff in the background - Strozok/Page etc). Why is the President, rather than taking a back seat while the Law Enforcement officers do their thing, having near daily press conferences publicly attacking the alleged victim?