Al Franken is Gone, Sexual Harassment Allegations are Harming Democrats

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The moral high ground is the basis of our power.

 

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What is one to do, then, when the basis of power results in having no power (such as the situation that Democrats find themselves in now?)

Can you imagine how dangerous the Republican party would be if they could act cohesively right now? They have the majority in the House and Senate, the sitting President, and are soon to have a conservative majority in the judiciary (if they don't already - I haven't kept up on the numbers).

The only reason millions of Americans still have health insurance right now is because the GOP had a handful of people who realized that if they pulled the plug, their constituents would likely riot. So, instead, they are doing it in a roundabout way (do you really expect Collins to get her concessions on restarting those payments? I doubt it!)

Democrats have virtually zero power right now to effect anything going on in the Federal Government.

So, I have to ask... what good is our "superior moral high ground" when it is utterly impotent?

I guess the ability to look at our future generation and go "Well, we played fair, but you're still fucked. We are poor, have no health insurance, and can't afford to put decent food on the table, but we kept our superior morals while ever larger percents of our nations GDP was shunted to the 1%."

As a parent to be, I can safely say that having the unchecked GOP in power scares the fuck out of me... and I don't think we can really wait until 2020 to start making changes.

 

It's a long game. When our majority comes, which is inevitable, it will be sustained.

 

The assumption being you have the moral high ground. It seems to be failing the Democratic Party at the moment, whatever that moral high ground might be.

 

Are you certain of this?

And, even if/when it does... what do you plan to do about all the ultra-conservative right-wing lifetime appointments to the judiciary? Tossing them out will feed into the Republican's "Partisan Politics" narrative...

Long game? Yeah, we could be looking at several decades to undo the damage being done right now...

 

Of course not.

Judges can be surprising. With a lifetime appointment, they don't have to answer to those who appointed them.

 

If memory serves, most thought that once Trump won the Republican Nomination, that Democrats had an ironclad victory in the General Election...

I don't think a Democratic Majority (much less a Super Majority) is inevitable at all, sadly.

 

Responsible stewardship of our own roles in the discourse. To wit:

• Short term: Stop harassing; speak out against harassment; stop mitigating harassment; stop making excuses for harassment; stop making demands to define and proscribe harassment.

• Middle term: We need particularly responsible public discourse, and, really, if we intend to ask survivors of sex crime to explain it to us one more time, we aren't dragging them through it for nothing. Because what we need right now is to understand the shape, scale, and pathology of the behaviors in order to properly address them. For instance, there is a bit I just don't like to touch, because it drives me nuts; there is a weird masculinist critique of "feminism" that I don't like to bother with unless it comes up, but it is not simply wrong, but also thoroughly sick because, to the first, it's wrongly applied, and to the second, it was actually written by a man. Still, though, what drives me nuts about it is the core idea, the seed of mythopoeia, is not entirely inaccurate. So it grates when I hear a particular organization described, even by feminists I respect, as foremost and leading; on this one point the organization really does have the appearance of conceding the futility of disrupting the genesis of rape culture. To the other, I also get what they're after, but as much as I would like to call it just a rhetorical vagary, I can't actually find the line between where they're at and saying boys will be boys so let's just worry about it when it comes up. Even still, and this is the important part, it's also a matter of splitting hairs in the dark. We're going to be like Harry Dean Stanton staring up at the alien, for a while. When will this beast stop standing up? It's one thing to argue about how to address rape culture, but the one thing we can say about the dimensions of the phenomenon is that its scale exceeds our present comprehension. As the high culture auto-da-fé plays out, the most useful thing we can do is learn everything we can about the dimensions and patterns of these behaviors ...

• Long term: ... because the longer view is to figure out how to break sexual violence. No, really. Full stop.​

Look around. The steady stream of bad news is taking its toll on everyone, but I would ask you to stop and think for a moment about who is getting absolutely curbstomped. Watch closely; the women you know who have been there, been through this, are carrying some pretty heavy burdens in all of this; they're getting thrashed. Survivors are reeling; society must necessarily tread this dangerous territory at some point, and by no means should this change or diminish the fact that it is lethal ground. We're going to start losing people. Or, rather, we will start hearing of it; nobody ought imagine we have not already.

There is also a testimonial arising outside the headlines and spotlights; the societal infliction against women is not reserved to the rich and famous; there is only one way forward, and that is to fight this beast wherever it shows itself. How about farm workers? Immigrants? It's easy enough for a union exec↱ to say to other union execs, but as anthropologist Jennifer S. Hirsch↱ recently opined:

The omission of working-class women's stories explains at least in part how women in Alabama might continue to support Moore—they may not believe that the outrage about famous men who do disgusting things is going to protect them from a boss who rubs up against them at the register or assaults them in the stockroom. What's been set in motion must lead to making policy changes so that women can work without fear in jobs where there's no black tie Christmas party. Otherwise we'll just be showing the working-class women who voted for Trump, despite his pussygrabbing, that they were right after all about their stories not mattering.​

And in the moment I might also note that it seems easy enough to predict this is not the last time our society steps up to face this demon of its psyche, but we should probably take a moment to consider that we are most definitely leaving people behind in a particular context, because it really is the most astonishing and grotesque thing.

We are going to risk leaving behind, this time, a corps of survivors, many of whom volunteer because they think they need to, and they think they need to for the very reasons you're panicking about, so you better damn well be grateful. They are, in fact, part of a much larger cohort, but society just doesn't listen to them, most days, and there is a range who might be empowered to demand audience, and they are keeping their mouths shut. And here is the confession of the knife as it twists: The only person right now who can change that, the only person who can force the rest of us, even the women who will lead us forward, to fall back, dig in, and fight right there, is a man.

One man. We know he is perfectly capable of this maneuver because he's tried it before. We're watching, quietly, as a different version rattles around the celeb circuit like a nuclear fucking pinball, but for now, well, there is this one dude who can set it off like a bomb.

Still, these women have every appearance of taking this one for the team if we let them, and all signs say we will.

There are presently a number of women, a certain classification, not standing up to be counted, right now, and in no small part because many of them wonder, as the rest of us do, at notions of critical mass and whether the gravity of which testimonials will finally be sufficient to trigger catastrophic societal implosion. So they are going to hold fast through this winter of discontent, and we are to return for them, as soon as possible, once we have ... er ... ah ... right. The best we can do is give them a reason, a vector, a chance, and if they take it we can pretend that was the plan the whole time.

But we don't get the long term without them. We do not get out of this godforsaken disaster without them. There comes a point at which the functional choice is whether we're going to write off a generation, and practical consideration becomes what promises we think we can make to the next once we have.

There is, though, a glaring silence right smack in the middle of this all, and it's worth figuring out, because we don't get out of here without those women.

If the ends justify the means, I can only reiterate that some things are not ours to give away.

One of the reasons men are fretting so much about politics and compromise is that we really have no idea how much compromise is in effect. Honestly, this is one of the times when I'm basically waiting for the feminists I trust to drop a hint about what vector I need to be on or seek or whatever, but there is stone silence in one corner of this discourse, and by every stream and vein of information reaching me they have at least as many reasons to not make themselves known today as to stand up and shatter the planet.

So while we talk about compromise or sacrifice, the bottom line is that we generally have no fucking clue. The scale of burden, and subtlety required to bear it, defy anything we know.
____________________

Notes:

Hirsch, Jennifer S. "Your outrage won’t trickle down to help working-class women". The Huffington Post. 16 November 2017. HuffingtonPost.com. 8 December 2017. http://bit.ly/2jaxEa0

McNary, Dave. "Gabrielle Carteris calls for sexual harassment protection in unions". Page Six. 26 October 2017. PageSix.com. 8 December 2017. http://pge.sx/2BYvT4n

 

See, this confuses me, then:

Right now, we can safely say the Republican party as a whole is not, and likely will not, take steps to make the policy changes needed to put this beast down once and for all.

I don't know if Democrats would/could - but they at least don't continually answer the question "When was America last great" with answers pointing towards slave ownership and the absolute control of women by men.

If we cannot end this problem entirely, do we not at least have the responsibility to put in charge a party that won't make it worse?

Obviously there are folks with (D) beside their name that need punished and/or ousted for wrongdoings... but I fear things, as they stand, are only solidifying the Republican base, who will believe "their man" over the calls of dozens of victims...

 

​

I laughed so hard when I read this!

Does it need to be complex? How about we men treat women like we would other men? Now I would not make sexual advances on another man, heck I would not even touch another man, ergo I do not make sexual advances on women or touch women. It is really that simply. Look if every man did as I do where would come the sexual violence on women?

Anyways I recommend you read this article, I'm sure you will find it invigorating: http://archive.is/scN1F

 

‘My husband? Oh, yes, he’s pathologically jealous, bless his heart, and a bit of a gun nut…’” My husband is perfect in every way but one—he doesn’t exist—but he has served me so well over the years that I’m willing to overlook his ontological defects.

Hilarious.

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Oh it gets better:

Why this moral panic, and why now? I’m not sure, to be honest. I can hazard a few speculations. We’ve in the past thirty years experienced a massive restructuring of gender roles. When Hanna Rosin wrote her 2010 Atlantic essay, “The End of Men,” she was not exaggerating. “What if,” she asked, “the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” What if? Because it seems very much that it is. “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength,” she wrote. “The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male.” America’s future, Rosin argued, belongs to women. “Once you open your eyes to this possibility, the evidence is all around you.” And it is.

Let us put this in the crudest of Freudian terms. Women have castrated men en masse. Perhaps this panic is happening now because our emotions about this achievement are ambivalent. Perhaps our ambivalence is so taboo that we cannot admit it to ourselves, no less discuss it rationally. Is it possible that we are acting out a desire that has surfaced from the hadopelagic zone of our collective unconscious—a longing to have the old brutes back? That is what Freud would suggest: We are imagining brutes all around us as a form of wish-fulfillment, a tidy achievement that simultaneously allows us to express our ambivalence by shrieking at them in horror.

The problem with Freudian interpretations, as Popper observed, is that they’re unfalsifiable. They’re not science. But they’re tempting. Certainly, something weird is going on here. It is taking place in the aftermath of the most extraordinary period of liberation and achievement women have ever enjoyed. No, of course we don’t want the old brutes back. But perhaps we miss something about that world. Wouldn’t it be comforting, for example, at a time like this, to believe what women used to believe—that responsible men were in charge of the ship of state, and especially our nuclear weapons?

Moral panics have a context. They emerge at times of general anxiety. Scholars of the Salem witch trials point to Indian attacks, the political reverberations from the English Civil War, crop failures, and smallpox outbreaks. Residents of colonial Massachusetts filtered these apprehensions through the prism of their Calvinist theology. If their moral panic was prompted by the anxieties of their era and adapted to the theology of their times, why should we be any different?
I’m not sure what, precisely, is now driving us over the edge. But I’d suggest looking at the obvious. The President of the United States is Donald J. Trump. Our country is not what we thought it was. We’re a fading superpower in a world of enemies. The people now running the United States cannot remotely persuade us, even for five minutes, that they know what they’re doing and are capable of keeping us safe. Who among us doesn’t feel profound anxiety about this? Daddy-the-President turns out to be a hapless dotard. Women who had hopefully imagined rough men standing ready to do violence on our behalf so we could sleep peacefully in our beds at night have discovered instead—psychologically speaking—that Daddy is dead.

That’s enough to make anyone go berserk. Perhaps this realization is powering some of the hysteria we’re now seeing about sexual harassment. Rapid social and technological change, a lunatic at the helm, no one knows what tomorrow will bring—we’re primed for a moral panic par excellence. That it has something to do with men and male beastliness is an adaptation to the theology of our era: American culture has been obsessed with gender—the rarer and odder the better—for at least the past decade. What’s more, we really do have an unreconstructed slob in the Oval Office, one who is genuinely offensive to women. Some of the anger directed at these poor groveling schmucks is surely—really—meant for him.

No woman in her right mind would say, “I want the old world back.” We know what that meant for women. Nor would we even consciously think it. But perhaps, instead, we are fantasizing that the old world has come back, rather than confronting something a great deal more frightening: It’s never coming back. We are the grown-ups now. We are in charge.

Anyways I know now what to call this year: "12017 (HE) : Year of the Warlock Hunt"

Update: Good news everyone at least we lost another republican: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...day-after-announcing-he-would-step/935858001/

Look man if you and your wife need a sarrgote mother: use craigslist, don't start asking your staffers, jesus, jesus christ! "aaah so Alice, these pamphlets are great, great job, I do have another task for you, see I aah sort of need to borrow your womb."

 

If we cannot end this problem entirely, can we at least, y'know, deal with reality?

More directly: Let me know when we've got that Party, m'kay?

Meanwhile, if you find it confusing that watching the elites hash it out to no avail only reminds the non-elite—farm worker, hotel housekeeper, fast food employee, retail associate, custodian, union line rigger, bus driver, schoolteacher, IT anomaly, and, oh, I don't know, we can make a hell of a list if we just keep thinking about it—that pretenses of justice and propriety are for elites to hash out for the sake of being seen, I don't know what to tell you.

Or is it that you didn't pay attention to what the opposition was saying, and thus missed it when Trump supporters cycled through the, "It doesn't matter, anyway", excuse for supporting a boasting sex assailant?

Then again, given everything else, these are the details that stand out? This is the problem that confuses you? Maybe they have a point, at least on that aspect, when suggesting it doesn't matter.

If we say it doesn't matter, and this stuff is going to go on ceaselessly, and nobody is going to stop it, would that, in your opinion, describing the the problem or the point? Because that's the thing. One of the reasons Hillary Clinton was asked to answer for her husband during the last campaign was that, well, since Republicans hate women, they needed a reason to tell women it didn't matter, and that's what they came up with. And if you want political irony, the Democratic failure over the course of the last twenty years on this count is only masked by the full-blown rape advocacy, ownership culture, and purity cult shitfire spectacle that utterly blew their exploitation of their exploited to the sort of dust that nothing good can ever be built from.

It doesn't matter whether there is a woman in the room or not in the question of looking at a Republican and saying, "Yeah, but you never cared, anyway, so shut the fuck up." Maybe it works for two dudes facebooking from the stalls at the pub, but no, it's not any sort of proper address of any useful endeavor.

 

Rebuild from the ground up, Tiassa. I have faith it can be done.

 

Nope. Only post-grads - the upper end of "education". She tied or slightly lost the "college grad only", lost the "community college" and "some college" http://theybf.com/2016/11/09/electi...how-americans-voted-by-race-gender-class-more

You can't respond honestly to my posts. Have you asked yourself why not?

Like they have been - Clinton was an example of "turning away"?

If they continue to collaborate in allowing the Republicans to maintain their current control of the framing in the media, suppress the racial vote and rig the machines, and gerrymander the districts after the census, the current trends continuing would be a safer bet than a dramatic reversal of public consciousness.

Imagine if the Republicans had had a half-decent candidate in 2016. Because they might field one. They might not keep fielding Trumps and their cheap illegal scams - there are respectable, dignified, Reaganesque types available. They won't have Trump's conman talent, but they won't have his horror-show baggage either.

No.
You cannot post three consecutive honest sentences. You are incapable of honesty and good faith, in this thread. Why is that?

Focus: the issue there was which women you believe, and which women you dismiss.
The women you dismissed as "status quo" dissemblers, unworthy of belief, not as enlightened as you, are well educated and long experienced. They believed some of Franken's accusers but not others. They believed some of the accounts, but not all. They had Franken pegged years ago. They did not project unto others, but looked at circumstances and made their best call. And they trust your political judgment about as far as they can throw Ann Wynia or Norm Colemen. They just lost CHIP funding, spiked on the self-righteousness of last year's self-described moral high ground. Now they are staring down the barrel of losing anyone who might restore it, or anything like it.

Yep. Own it.
Look at this:

No shame at all. No lie too ugly, or too blatant.
(I vacillated between that and pointing out it would - if it existed - look better than the "You're a niggerlover" attack in your response,
which underlies 3/4 of your posting here, come to think of it,
and decided to try to go with both. Too fat to pass up)

Not three consecutive sentences. Simply incapable of good faith and honest response.

Not three honest sentences in a row. You can't do it.

Of course I'm not persuading you of anything. I'm drawing you out, as a warning to others.

The way you respond to my posts here is how folks like you do politics. The price of abandoning reason and honesty and good faith will be paid regardless of the worthiness of the cause. And it's not low.

And stop slandering, stop lying, stop falling for cheap cons and abandoning principles and betraying reason, stop imposing one's own psychotherapy on other people's politics, stop flailing. Become reliable and sane, and speak to other people honestly and in good faith.

Look: Therapeutic enlightenment and progress requires bottoming out, hitting a wall, falling apart. That should happen one by one, personally - you don't want the country to bottom out, politically, unless there is no other choice. There is no safe space, for a country. And if you are lying and slandering to create that situation, there probably is another choice.

Hold that thought. It'll come around again.

The French Revolution is a bad model. The Bolshevik Revolution is a bad model. The Jesuit "Holy Lie" is a bad model. If responsible public discourse is your need.

 

Maybe I'm just tired, but damn if that doesn't sound like fatalism... Or, maybe, futilism? I dunno... I'm going to sleep so I'm not worthless at work tomorrow