Al Franken is Gone, Sexual Harassment Allegations are Harming Democrats

[Bells]

Or if I deliberately objected to your lumping of all women voters, as if that were a category you could appeal to via Franken's resignation. Clinton did not draw "women's" votes, but non-white, less educated, women's votes. Other Dems have failed likewise, in Minnesota.

She actually drew the minority votes and educated voters when it comes to women.

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why?

And a higher percentage of educated white women voters. Dems can't count on drawing women just because they are Dems, in Minnesota.

Clinton actually had a higher margin of educated white women voters.

Democrats will do worse with female voters the longer and the more they keep turning the other way.

As I believe you know, since it was clearly typed right in front of you, I wasn't talking about accusations against Bill. I was specific: Hillary has been accused, by several women, of abetting and collaborating in their sexual assaults and abuses - accusations worse than Franken's worst accusation, women claiming more serious harm done to them than by Franken. So we would expect you to believe them, and call for Clinton's resignation had she won. If we took you seriously, in your claims here.
What excuse could you present, for not believing those women and acting accordingly?

And as I believe you should know, I answered that. Perhaps you should go back and read what. The manner in which Hillary was accused, I disagree with. It was not her crime or her doing.

She was a victim of her husband's actions. And I never said that I did not believe his accusers.

It's astonishing, that instead of blaming him, people blame her.

You were in the wrong, misrepresenting "these" arguments in order to slander.

Are you suggesting that you would throw down like this if Franken had been a Republican?

You were wrong about that, too. As you were informed at the time, because I answered in good faith when you pretended to ask (even though I knew better). But your question was not honest, not actually a question - it was a false claim, posted to slander, framed exactly as Fox News is famous for framing such innuendo and slander in "questions", for exactly the same reason.

So says the guy who compared my stance of zero tolerance for sexual harassment to the woman endorsing a paedophile..

I was talking about you, and your posts, not them. You hide behind those women frequently.

What about me and my posts? You really seem to have an issue with the whole notion that I consider what he did sexual harassment and it's what? 8 women now? What number is good enough for you, and the women around you, for him to resign? 10? 12? 15? Or is it that you do not consider the issue of sexual harassment by men in power, to warrant such a response or demand of resignation? But I am asking you, how many would be sufficient for you to say 'err yeah, he needs to go now'?

Since you are pitching this fit for 8 women accusing him of sexual harassment and sexual assault, what number would see you take pause and think 'he needs to resign, he should no longer be deemed fit for this role'?

You should post honestly, and not slander and troll and lie about people. Hiding behind victims of assault, justifying your slanders, attacks, and dishonest trolling, by pointing to courageous victims of assault, is dishonorable and bad.

I am a victim of assault, iceaura. And I am speaking for myself.

Or do you want to go through mine too, to determine if it wasn't just an act of impulse or jerkiness? You know, to make sure I can tell the difference?

Yes. Your good cause does not excuse your unethical, dishonest posting here - any more than it would Conway's, if her cause were good.

Republican framing, rhetoric. Quote my accusations, if you cannot paraphrase accurately - which you can't.

Yep. Republican rhetoric.

More lies and slander, increasingly disconnected from the posts.
You can't write three consecutive honest sentences about my posting here. Why is that?

Oh I am. You just don't like the content.

Protesting the loss of male hierarchy? As we say in Minnesota: whatever.
But now you extend your terminally deluded, completely bullshit, inexcusably slanderous fantasy projections unto me to women you don't know anything about, and slander them simply on account of their association with me. After all that prattle about believing women, women are speaking, women know what they're talking about - the second you don't like what they say, all that goes right out the window and they're patsies and tools of the nearest man, defenders of the nearest male hierarchy and your imagination of the status quo, doing what you assume is expected of them by the society you imagine them to be living in, by presumption.

How have I slandered them? They are a product of their environment. It is what it is.

Just like white women flocked to vote for the guy who was grabbing pussy and boasting about how he forced himself on women, they too are a product of their environment.

As for you, you posted one of the most misogynistic pieces of bullshit that I haven't seen here in a while. It is what it is.

Not the Trump voting, birther believing, professionally coached and rhetorically sly Republican accusers of Franken, of course - those are "women speaking", not anyone's patsies or tools, certainly not acting in the service of any kind of male hierarchy or status quo.

Ah, here we go.

So the Democrat staffer, congressional aide, the reporter who identified as a democrat, were all coached as well? Or just Tweeden and the second accuser? I mean, it's interesting how you completely ignore the Democrat female voters who also accused him. And by stupidly coming out with this, you also seek to slander and discredit his other accusers. I mean, you won't go so far as to do this to them, since you know, politics and whatnot. So you go after the two Republican women who accused him first and hope for a trickle down effect. It's a fairly common thing. What you are doing, I mean.

The irony is that Moore's accusers are also Trump voting women, but you believe them, right?

Another characteristic you share with the Republican authoritarians: shamelessness.

Well, the misogynistic playbook words just keep coming out, don't they?

Meanwhile you..

This is where failing to distinguish the Frankens and Bartons (and Spitzers and Keillors and so forth) from the Moores and Trumps and Ailes's takes you: to a place in which you can't separate predators from jerks, crime from offensiveness, calculation from impulse, fear from disgust, injury from insult; to a place in which reason does not govern.

Yeah, and apparently I share being "shameless" with Republican authoritarians who are bending over backwards to defend a paedophile and a pussy grabber by playing it all down...

btw: If I pass on your description of the "women around me" to the women I referred to above, to (say) the wife of the increasingly strident emails to the DNC, or the married lesbian radical feminist sister and her wife of the last straw disgust with DFL management (they actually know the principals) - she's been reminding me that folks like you don't actually know much about Minnesota or US politics and I should be charitable, but she hasn't got the full flavor of your posting (and I haven 't played my trump card of reminding her about Anne Wynia, Emily's List, and the wages of distant ignorance) - do you want me to relay the response? Some women for you to listen to?

Ya. And your 'I have black friends' defense is really a good look for you right about now....

But what do you think, iceaura? That I am going to alter my zero tolerance to sexual harassment policy because the women in your life are willing to look past it, like you, for political expediency? You can tell them whatever you like, you can relay the colour I paint my toenails, for all I care. I mean, this whole "I'm telling my mother you said that!" style of argument you are currently running with is, well, cute. But I've been there done that. I mean, I could go and wake up my ex-husband and tell him what you have been arguing and I could relay what he would say in response, but I grew out of that kind of thing when I was 10 years of age. But relay away. Have at it. I will still have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to sexual harassment, regardless of what those women in your life may say in response to that.

 

[Bells]

Well put pjdude - simply said, we don't have the luxury of keeping ourselves squeaky clean and out of the squick and mire when faced with a force that will use that superior morality against us as a cudgel to ensure justice is denied.

Tell me, say you have a daughter one day.

How could you look her in the eyes when you know full well you sold your integrity in regards to her safety and wellbeing in society in how she should be treated as a human being, for political expediency?

'Well honey, we had to support and defend sexual harassers and abusers, because they were doing it first and we had to win!!!'..?

History has given us many lessons of just how those who sell out to win, are viewed by the next or later generations. And astonishingly enough, people still haven't learned from them.

 

[spidergoat]

but the simple truth remains when going up against people who have no morality at all, unless you have an overwhelming power advantage which we do not, you have make compromises on your morality

The moral high ground is the basis of our power.

 

[Kittamaru]

The moral high ground is the basis of our power.

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.

 

[spidergoat]

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

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

 

[Bowser]

The moral high ground is the basis of our power.

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.

 

[Kittamaru]

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

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...

 

[spidergoat]

Are you certain of this?

Of course not.

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

 

[Kittamaru]

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.

 

[Tiassa]

Okay then - let us hear your proposal on how this should be fixed, perhaps?

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

 

[Kittamaru]

See, this confuses me, then:

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.

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...

 

[ElectricFetus]

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.​

​

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

 

[Bowser]

‘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.

 

[ElectricFetus]

‘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.

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."

 

[Tiassa]

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?

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.

 

[Bowser]

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.

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

 

[iceaura]

Clinton actually had a higher margin of educated white women voters.

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

She actually drew the minority votes and educated voters when it comes to women.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why?

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

Democrats will do worse with female voters the longer and the more they keep turning the other way.

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.

So the Democrat staffer, congressional aide, the reporter who identified as a democrat, were all coached as well? Or

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.

Yeah, and apparently I share being "shameless" with Republican authoritarians who are bending over backwards to defend a paedophile and a pussy grabber by playing it all down.

Yep. Own it.
Look at this:

Ya. And your 'I have black friends' defense is really a good look for you right about now....

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.

The irony is that Moore's accusers are also Trump voting women, but you believe them, right?

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

But what do you think, iceaura? That I am going to alter my zero tolerance to sexual harassment policy because the women in your life are willing to look past it, like you, for political expediency?

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.

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

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.

• Middle term: We need particularly responsible public discourse,

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.

 

[Bells]

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

That breakdown is interesting. Thank you for posting that. Other data I have seen tend to just show "college educated", without a breakdown post election.

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

I do answer honestly to your posts, iceaura. Your issue is that I simply do not agree with you about Franken.

I say I have zero tolerance to sexual harassment. Your response is to lose your proverbial shit because I am saying this about Franken as well. So of course you accuse me of lying, of apparently posting Republican arguments (despite some Republicans coming out and saying that Franken should not have resigned, for example, and their reasoning is purely political. Not because they do not think he has done anything wrong, but because of how his resignation is making them look).. And it is why you have yet to actually answer questions about your stance here and instead respond as you are.

I will address that as we go.

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.

Oh for heaven's sake, wake up and stop stagnating in this conspiracy driven hell hole you have dug for yourself.

Do you honestly think that the Democrats would have had the moral high ground if Franken and Conyers had not resigned? That would have hung around your neck, as much as Moore and Trump will hang around the neck's of the GOP. When you are willing to sell your soul and your dignity just to win.. At what cost?

Do you honestly believe you would have regained the female voters, primarily the white female voters who went to Trump in the last election, if you had a man with a string of sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations out there, stumping for women's rights? Do you think those women voters or the media (apparently all driven by the Republicans) would come flocking back if Franken had not been made to resign or if the media had not focused on Franken as much? You wouldn't have regained the female voters. You might have regained some of the white male voters. But again, at what cost.

You complain that Franken was compared to Trump and Moore. You fail to recognise that even if Trump and Moore had not happened, what Franken did would still be bad. In other words, the horror show that is Franken's behaviour is not bad because of Trump and Moore. It is bad on its own. It stands on its own. And no, you would not have won those female voters back who turned away from the party because of Clinton or because of Trump. You might now though, because the party is willing to throw down to expel members who sexually harass or sexually assault women from the houses of government. Making a moral stand and saying 'not acceptable' is a better visual than 'well they are worse!'..

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.

As long as the GOP continues to court the right wing and the Christian fundamentalists, they will not be capable of fielding a half decent candidate. As long as the GOP courts the far right racists, they will be incapable of fielding a half decent candidate. As long as the GOP continues to excuse and ignore and endorse sexual offenders, they will not be capable of fielding a half decent candidate.

As long as the Democrats continue with a policy that sets them away from the Republicans, and as long as they continue to demand rights for women and minorities and point out just how the GOP is striving to erode protections and rights for women and minorities, as long as the Democrats are able to stand up and say we do not stand with sex offenders, they will field decent candidates.

Do you get what I'm saying here? As long as those who commit these offenses remained as Democrat senators or congressmen, the Democrats would not be able to lob those rocks at the GOP. Why do you think so many Republicans are so antsy about Franken resigning?

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

And why couldn't you answer the question?

Do you believe all of them or not? Or do you differentiate because some of his accusers are Republicans?

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.

*Raise eyebrows*
Where did I say that I did not believe his Republican accusers?

Where did I say that the women who are literally existing in an atmosphere that they are required to maintain the status quo should not be believed? They are living their existence and their experiences. Why would I not believe them? They don't think he should have resigned? Okay. I can respectfully disagree with them. They believe that his accusers are being trumped up by the GOP or Republican controlled media? I can disagree with that too because from my perspective, this seems to be a desperate cling to partisanship instead of just believing the women who accused him. As I said, they are living the existence that requires a status quo. People who buck the trend, who accuse one's like Franken, fits outside of that sphere, so naturally they water it down, question the accusers, question their motives, question if it is political, question whether it is driven by the Republican controlled media, naturally they will argue that he should not be made to resign because of Moore and Trump, they will cite the good he has done for women's rights and overlook what he did to women.

I mean, this is what is expected of them, just as it is expected that Franken's accusers would not suggest he resign, except one who thought he should do the right thing and resign instead of dragging all of his victims through a public Senate hearing. This is what they learned and what is expected of them. That is their truth. I believe them. I just don't agree with them when it comes to Franken's resignation. I may disagree vehemently with Tweeden's politics, but it does not mean I do not believe her. Do you understand the difference?

 

[Bells]

Yep. Own it.

How low are you willing to go?

Ah, here we go:

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.

Firstly, context.

Secondly, you deliberately misrepresented what I said and in response to what. What? Going for showmanship?

Thirdly, you have yet to actually answer any questions in regards to Franken's offenses and his accusers and instead, you keep turning it back onto me. You cite how the women around you were responding to the demand he resign, flapped on about relaying this or that and I point out that it is quite childish, it comes across as the 'I have black friends' response when a racist is confronted with his own racism, as I have confronted you about your misogyny and you are still to answer actual questions without resorting to responses like this...

So you accuse me of apparently posting like a Republican, accuse me of apparently being in line with a woman who endorsed a paedophile to the senate, you now accuse me of racism or being the type of person to say words like "niggerlover" or would accuse someone of being that, and apparently 3/4 of my posts "here" (I mean, do you mean this whole site, or just this and the Moore thread?)... And why? Because I have repeatedly stated I have zero tolerance for sexual harassment and sexual assault and because I disagree with you in regards to how Franken was treated or compared with Moore and Trump (which was not because of the differences in behaviour, but because the behaviour occurred at all to begin with).

Keep digging iceaura. My next question will be what else are you willing to excuse from Democrats?

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

And you cannot answer any questions in regards to your position here.

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

You want to draw me out as a woman who has zero tolerance of sexual harassment?

Err okay. Go for it.

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.

As I said, each time I have asked you a question, you have turned it back on me and dodged the question, accused me of a range of things, now you are boasting about how you are "drawing me out", apparently to warn others.. Do you tweet at 3am too?

 

[Kittamaru]

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.

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