Al Franken is Gone, Sexual Harassment Allegations are Harming Democrats

Perhaps a simpler hypothetical - at one time in not so distant US History women, minorities, and LGBT folks had, literally, no rights nor expectations of legal protections... and this was accepted by society, and even embraced by much of it as normal.

God forbid, were such a mindset to take hold again... What would happen to these groups were such rights and protections not enshrined in law? What is the risk?

 

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It’s not the framework that’s problematic, it’s your comprehension of it. The operation of automobiles is merely a common contemporary reference to illustrate the relative aspects of offensive behavior. Pick any social circumstance from any historical era and you’ll find the same inconsistent rationalizations at work.

I’m not denying that an ass grab can be legitimately perceived to be an offensive act, but it’s rank in the set of social offenses needs to be rationally assessed. Actions such as distracted and impaired driving are far more common and much less stigmatized than that of habitually comparable ass grabbing. When the inconsiderate ass grabber makes contact people get annoyed. When the inconsiderate driver makes contact people get injured or die.

Should any person guilty of willfully engaging in behaviors that endangered the lives of others be considered unfit for public office? How many involved in this thread would be off the ballot under such a rule?

 

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It sounds to me like you're making up fallacies to argue against.

 

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Thanks for proving my point about why careful consideration is important... too many are willing to go off without even considering the ramifications.

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These people can't post any differently because they can't think any differently, and they have to slander (power based) because power is what they have left after burning reason.

These kinds of utterly dishonest attempts at slandering precisely illustrate the problem this faction has created for the DFL in Minnesota right now.
They will not replace reality for any but a small percentage of people - not enough to cover what association with them threatens to cost, by an order of magnitude.

Why is that here, on this thread? We already know, don't we. It's not subtle - Minnesota voters are not going to miss such things.

As was perfectly clear in the context, unavoidably for anyone even attempting to post honestly and in good faith:
The people who use the English language to reason and discuss things.
You are welcome to give up your current practice and join them, any time. If you can.
I think you would find yourself still able to argue against endemic sexism, abuse of women, societal oppression of women, and all the usual suspects in this thread - including me.
- - - -

The original issue in my posts was your faction's not only making that determination for others in a particular case, but assigning a wide range of consequences for others, for the State of Minnesota and every woman in it - in matters of which you and yours are almost completely uninformed, almost completely unable to reason even from accurate perception, and apparently remarkably naive. Specifically: a whole State full of women got told what to do about Franken, and when to do it, and why, and what was good for them, and even how to talk about it, by a fairly small faction of mostly distant and/or ill-informed people, who were not making much sense, and who appeared to be at best careless - heedless of consequences.

That was before, when certain illusory assumptions still held.

My new issue is why this faction (represented here by Bells and Tiassa) in my local State politics cannot employ honest rhetoric or post in good faith when replying to my posts here. It's thread relevant, because that is my nomination for the most significant source of the harm they threaten to the DFL (the State Democrats).

 

He apparently groped and harassed several women to some degree. The expression of that intolerance, what the rightfully intolerant and unaccepting do about this, should be calibrated accordingly - with the degree, the harm of what he actually did and in what context, in mind - right?

It wasn't. Obviously and unfortunately very publicly and now undeniably was not. By Party identified people, facing an election season of Partisan complexity.

Meanwhile, among the many factors left out of that poor whiff of a calibration: the consequences assigned were not just to Franken - his job was not some kind of trophy, an honorary degree, a reward for fine character and great deeds, or even a position of moral example and lesson: he was in the middle of performing a public service, doing stuff we need to get done, especially the "we" of women in Minnesota. He was far better than average at representing Minnesota women's interests in the Senate, in his job performance - an eight year record of doing much better in that respect than the average holder of his job. His record - what he actually did - is better than Klobuchar's, or Gillebrand's, for example. And part of that was his Party identification - his ability to gain and hold a Senate seat for the Democratic Party, and his security in it for the next few years. Are you familiar with the expression "pissing in the soup"?

That soup is water under the bridge, now. We are now dealing with those poorly calibrated consequences. Cross your fingers - it's looking like the worst is not happening. Yet.

It seems to me they have, and that this is visible in the defensiveness on display. It is also visible in advertising, a reality-of-the-market-driven enterprise, and the like.
I don't remember the bad of the adult world from my childhood - were I restricted to memory, I would see today's explosion of revelations and backlash as an indication of something recent in all manner of bad stuff, including racism etc. It was worse, before, the misogyny, the simple assumptions behind it and enforced by it. It just wasn't acknowledged - and therefore in need of defense - in public. It had a safe space of chivalry and economic hierarchy, custom and habit - look at the regions where these still hold unchallenged sway.

Another evident improvement: the recognition that an accumulation of trivialities can be a serious matter, not only as an indication of fundamental corruption but as a hardship in itself - with a victim, and a class of identifiable perps. A pat on the butt may be a long way from perpetrating forcible rape, but the inability to live one's life without finding strange hands on one's butt at any time is not nearly as far from being a victim of it. And then there is the threat involved - completely absent, perp view, inherent in the ubiquity and unavoidability,
victim view. Traditionally, and probably rightly in most matters, we calibrate punishment on the basis of the perp's point of view - how bad was the intent, how abhorrent the state of mind, how visible to the perp the harm done - but we have other bases available.

If we reason from them. Only if we reason from them. Power will not take that side.

Because these bases - governance from the victim's and/or community's point of view - threaten the rich and powerful. What's being fought here is not restricted to male hierarchy, but infuses all hierarchy.

 

I never didn't care about the victim. The fact that you seem to think one can only care about one or the other (that is, the victim or ensuring equitable enforcement of the law) is your problem.

Then again, the fact that you are back to your rabid insults and other such tripe tells me that you are, once again, trolling me. *shrug* And here I thought you wanted to help sexual assault victims- I guess you'd rather use them for self gratification; I shall have no part in that sickness.

 

Well since punishment is defined as the law that is difficult to say. Would you say harassing someone and his co-patriots until he disappears completely from public life and his career, is within the law? I brought up the issue before with you, that if I had thousands of followers contacting your friends and family to inform them of your satanic child cannibalism, would you think that is legal?

 

The problem in this aspect is your shifting focus. Not long ago you were worried about due process for the accused, despite the fact that many of them had personally struggled to avoid due process. Then it was at-will employment, and honestly, why is sympathy for sexual harassment what moves you to suddenly realize how full of shit at-will employment is? No, really, think about it for a moment: Something goes on every day of people's lives, and generally speaking they either don't care or put up with it in the context of futility; but, then, along comes an issue that tweaks their aesthetics, and this becomes the threshold for asking. No, really: What is anyone supposed to think watching workforces destroyed by at-will cullings, but what makes a worker wonder about why it's so easy to do this is famous men getting cut down for sexual harassment?

And think about your concern for the accused: You couldn't explain what you meant by due process, which did help avoid discussion of what counts as due process, and never really had much to say about the efforts of the accused to escape due process.

For instance, how many reporting processes for what crimes have built-in doubt requiring a worker complaining of harassment to undergo counseling, undertake mediation, sign an NDA, and then go through a cool-down period in order to be certain they really want to complain, and then a bureaucrat decides whether you get a day in court or are shuffled off to administrators with vested interest?

What other crimes?

What's that? What am I talking about? I'm talking about process.

So when Democratic supporters claim John Conyers was denied due process, they need to explain why he didn't want the due process they want, but some other assertion of due process, instead? Or in Nevada, where an accused Congressman wants the ethics process, and isn't going to run in November; this will effectively bury the claim, and if anyone is ever upset that his reputation is damaged without due process, they will need to account for his effort to hide in process.

So, your due process campaign on behalf of the accused, including the bit about at-will employment, didn't work. The only part of Bells' question I disagree with—

—is the word "now". It is a perfectly serviceable word, but on this occasion I would propose it is at least three weeks late↑.

What you're doing ranges somewhere between Godwin's Law and Now-More-Than-Everism. The latter is just what it sounds like, the idea that the the same solution we offered last time is what we need to do this time, and now, more than ever; the archetypal example is Republicans and "tax cuts". The former is an unfortunate marker, but I had occasion to consider it recently↱ because, well, that sort of stuff is going on in my society, right now. The device we're looking at for the moment has to do with appealing to disparate interests while consistently seeking an outcome, and is generally predictable as a supremacist appeal insofar as any given iteration of supremacism, if entertained long enough, will eventually get around to asserting it.. As relates the Nazis, there was a time when Americans parsed a difference 'twixt Holocaust denial and revisionist diminution; the argument quite literally involved the proposition that one hurt the Jews by not accepting that the Jews were exaggerating the Holocaust.

Let me be clear, though: It's not just Nazis. Like I said, it's an unfortunate marker; it literally comes up because revisionist diminution used to be the out, the #notaNazi appeal, the signal that one wasn't dangerous, and, well, that excremental, parsing pretense of safety officially died when a Nazi sympathizer reciting Trump as he went after CNN; apparently he's not actually a Holocaust denier, but identifies with Hitler and something about how the Holocaust was "exaggerated". It hadn't really come up in my circles, according to that old context, for a long, long time.

In the Gay Fray, some people tried switching from arguing the rights of supremacists to dissent from equal protection to the pretense that we're going too fast, and civil rights will actually hurt gay people so why do you hate gay people by demanding their civil rights? And in that case, it was a classic case of the bully class being cornered and deciding now, as they are about to lose, is the time to stop and talk everything through.

Once upon a time, we stole a lot of money from American tribes on the pretense that it was cruel to let them have their money. Suddenly a bunch of white supremacists were worried about the people of the First Nations: It would be mean to allow those people access to their own money, and why would we want to be cruel to the Injuns?

Do you see how this works?

You literally started a thread about this. Yes, evil will fight dirty; this isn't news. The alternative, then, is what, to slow down and let evil do its work? That's one of the things you just can't seem to make any sense out of, and in large part that is because the issue you are botching isn't actually what you're on about.

And, by the way, Bells can always respond to my questioning the word "now" by simply invoking a different definition, and she will actually be correct, because the word also represents the place of your current tack in the sequence. We can follow this back to you asking yet again for others to tell you what the solutions are↑, and watch you tack↑ in response to an answer.

You do realize some have accepted that futility and disruption are your purpose?

 

So far, so good -

A symbolic vote only - Stras was confirmed - but early indication that at least some aspects of the worst possible outcomes have been dodged.

 

The title of this thread no doubt helped open the door to objections of "partisanship" - but the issue involved is not strictly Party demarcated: it's a Republicans vs World matter.

And so we see this, https://www.insidehighered.com/quic...gao-report-sexual-harassment-federally-funded

And there's nothing wrong with this, on the surface. It's overdue, it's part of good governance, it's bipartisan, it's all good.

But: the scientists in the Federal agencies listed there are generally hostile to Lamar Alexander. The man's a climate change denier, a supporter of teaching "intelligent design" and Biblical creation accounts in high school science classes, and so forth. He's prolife. He's anti-environment. He's one of the faces of the anti-intellectual and especially anti-science efforts of the Republican Party.
And the Democrat is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Bernice_Johnson
https://www.texastribune.org/2017/10/19/eddie-bernice-johnson-walks-back-comments-sexual-assault/
Heart's in the right place, may not be up on the latest scientific research or sexual politics.

And so the effect of this will be to clean up (great) and in the process weaken to some extent (uh oh) - and burden with extra regulations - specifically some of the opposition to Republican efforts and policies. That will be the case even if it is enforced and implemented fairly - contrary to Lamar Alexander's MO. The weakening will be in the scientific opposition to Republican fossil fuel and nuclear power initiatives, in climate change and related research, in any health measures related to abortion such as stem cell research, and so forth.

Note that military research - a large source of grants etc as well, and famous for dubious treatment of women - is not listed except indirectly via Energy or NASA.

 

The thread was opened to reiterate the priority of formulating sexual harassment as an electoral consideration.

Furthermore, the title of the thread is, technically, also significant: Sexual harassment happens because people sometimes behave poorly. Allegations will have some impact, but the behavior itself, e.g., actual sexual violence, is even more damaging, and the political response, such we have seen from ostensible Franken supporters, can further denigrate institutions like the Democratic and DFL parties.

People do dumb shit, and that can hurt organizations. When people handle those problems poorly, they can do even more damage to the organizations they would otherwise pretend to care about. Angry conspiracism that sounds, at best, like just another day in a world laden wannabe gaslights working to reserve safe circumstance for sexual violence.

Faced with questions of sexual violence, political parties only make things worse if they labor to reinforce the problem according to the principle that others are worse. In this context, as with so much of the American political experience of late, it isn't so much a question of left and right, or liberal and conservative, as civilized society to the one and celebration of antisocial behavior to the other.

 

Maybe, hard to say. But it left that behind in the posting pretty quickly.

We haven't seen much, if any, political response from "ostensible Franken supporters".
The political damage to the DFL, if any, is not from them.

And it's reasonable to point that stuff out, that dumb shit that people do. It's not a moral failing, just because the dumb shit was in a good cause.

The Rep definition of better and worse invalidates that, for them.
But it's true for the Dems - best for Dems not do that, then.