Speaking of a confluence of conservative laziness and anti-Semitic propaganda, have you guys heard of that Washington Post "reporter" named Bernie Bernstein?

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/sunday-review/bernie-bernstein-fake-jews.html

[quote=Some guy in the NYT comments section]
"I’m a reporter for The Washington Post calling to find out if anyone at this address is a female between the ages of 54 to 57 years old, willing to make damaging remarks about candidate Roy Moore for a reward of between $5,000 and $7,000. We will not be fully investigating these claims however we will make a written report."

There are so many holes in that telephoned narrative, an elephant could walk through them. Yet despite the speciousness of the story, people were willing to believe it. That depressing fact speaks to willingness to believe the worst about Jews and also willingness to believe the unbelievable. And the prevelance of illogic, which fuels both bigotry and unworthy candidates like Roy Moore and Donald Trump, is creating pathologies from which this nation will ail long after any upcoming elections.

[/Quote]

What does any of this (besides Jones' latest post) have to do with celebrity sexual assault scandals?

We're raping the earth, and the earth is very famous.

That's pretty good. Carry on.

Well-known, maybe, but famous? The Earth is a B-list planet at best.

Those scandals are being paraded about to distract the public from the impending climate holocaust.

So apparently in 2010, Al Franken touched someone's butt. We may be looking at scandal of George H.W. Bush proportions.

In other news, a feminist New York Times reporter learns that holiness is no match for alcohol and testosterone.

And now a sixth (I imagine similarly trumped up) allegation of inappropriate touching against Al Franken, yet again without any way to tell if he was just putting his body close to her, or deliberately or subconsciously violating her, and still without any reasonable way to say these accusers represent an accurate sample of legitimate victims and not a smear campaign (i.e., swiftboating).

I like how the majority of accusations happened during photo shoots, but literally none of the photos show what’s alleged to have happened or even any reaction to it whatsoever by either of the alleged participants.

I mean, what?

The latest one claimed he grabbed her breast in a photo, and she even supplied the photo to the media, and his hands are nowhere near her chest. One hand is by his side, and the other is on her back. This is some weird **** right here.

I am perfectly willing to believe that at some point Al Franken may have inappropriately touched somebody while hugging them, and I wouldn't apologize for it at all.

It's just that this string of accusations seem to follow a formula (here's the photo he took with me, and btw here's what happened right before) that seems to be optimized to maximally exploit the current media zeitgeist, but without any way to prove it. Given the large number of conservative women he has likely taken photo ops with, it's trivial to assume that at least six of them would seize on this opportunity.

But now I hear people trying to use liberal's defense of Al Franken as a general indictment of "trial by media", all the way to Roy Moore.

The right's war on truth is really toxic to discourse, because it makes it impossible to refute accusations of a double standard applied toward conservatives and liberals in estimating the veracity of heresy. They always say: "Oh you liberals are such hypocrites, when a conservative does it, you are all over our case, but when a liberal does it you guys bend over backwards to defend `em!"

But the thing is, such great asymmetry in the amount of bull**** being pumped out by either side, the honest answer to that question is "yes, you guys are usually full of ****", but at that point it's impossible for the conversation not to degenerate into name calling (which they seem to anticipate, given that they start off doing this anyway).

Two party system is a mistake when combined with capitalism, since it neatly partitions voters into two categories: the prosperous and educated on the one hand, and the economically disenfranchised who have nothing to lose by arguing in bad faith on the other hand.

I just wish the media weren't so deregulated to the point that it's hard for average folk to break out of the propaganda matrix that keeps conservatives in line regardless of any of this. sigh

"If you have the law, hammer the law. If you have the facts, hammer the facts. If you have neither the law nor the facts, hammer the table"

I'm beginning to think that Al Franken might be guilty.

Too bad. I hoped I might get to vote for him in 2020. But he's a butt groper, so...

I do think Democrats are naive to think that if they create the standard that people who commit acts of sexual assault should be banned from office, that it will be easier to take the president down. And I think nobody is really aware to what extent the desire to remove Trump from office is what's motivating all of this. But it won't work. He's too shameless. It won't matter how much pressure is put on him to resign. He won't do it.

If Al Franken resigns, do you think it will hurt Roy Moore?

Polls show that Moore and Jones are locked in a competitive race. It's feasible that Franken resigning could make some Republican voters stay home. But I'm pessimistic. It might've been a different story before the RNC pulled its money out of Alabama, and while McConnell was still against Moore's candidacy (he later retreated and said it was up to Alabama voters to decide). It may be that Moore gets into the Senate, and then shortly after gets the boot. That's probably the outcome that Republicans want at this point in the game, because it means that Alabama's governor would get to choose his replacement, so they could replace him with a Republican.

Seems like a cool guy: https://twitter.com/chrismassie/status/938833735893561350

This really seems like the best option in my mind, unless Democrats want to punish the Republican voters for sticking with Moore this long. The RNC already disavowed him (but now supports him?). I think there would be a lot of bitterness coming from Republicans if they saw a Democrat swoop in because of these "unproven" allegations. Even if it was their fault for not running a different candidate once this whole thing blew up (or preferably they would have vetted him long before that, since his transgressions seem to have been well known in Alabama).

That said, I have no idea why I would expect Alabama Republicans to see themselves as accountable to any of that.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/12/08/roy-moore-accuser-admits-forged-part-yearbook-inscription-attributed-to-alabama-senate-candidate.html

Yeah because that ****ing justifies it

**** Republicans

When arguing with idiots, eventually one side wins, every time. Which side wins always is determined by whether or not there is a reliable arbiter of truth. In a democracy, this is always at risk of degenerating to absolutely everybody being their own arbiter of truth, down to the last idiot. So you reach a point where the idiots always win, and then they elect their idiot king.

[Quote=H. L. Mencken]
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. [/Quote]

...and in a capitalist democracy, this form of idiocy seems to necessarily manifest in idiots being sold a fraudulent narrative fabricated on behalf of capital, in which they are led to believe it is patriotic to fight for their own economic demise.

Electing an alleged sex offender is just icing on the cake.

Some libertarians will tell you that the welfare state (as they put it) is incompatible with democracy.

I believe that capitalism may be ultimately incompatible with democracy.

Putting these two statements together:

• Anarcho-capitalists like Hans-Hermann Hoppe write books fetishizing monarchy as superior to democracy. They don't seem to want democracy, and wealthy, anti-democratic RNC donors agree, and try to suppress the vote of lower classes.
• Given that we have on record that there is an ideology and also actual political activity in support of it toward suppressing democracy, why do we allow self-described anarcho-capitalists to vote? I am totally serious.

In the end, and I am sure conservatives agree, we have to admit that at its core, the United States is not foremost a democracy. (And when you consider that we started out without democracy and ask them to defend those early days as a golden age despite the fact that slavery existed, you put conservatives in a rather uncomfortable position.)

Forget about socialist revolution. What about a revolution in which we just go for universal suffrage? We've already had one of those, why not again? Though this time we don't necessarily have the federal government on our side, nor do we have the support of all the people who own the guns. Basically the only weapons we have are feminist ideology at universities, journalists, cell phone cameras, Twitter, and the Facebook like button.

So apparently if you work for a holier-than-thou liberal publication, you are liable to lose you job if a women you dated feels acrimony toward you because of the way you treated her. And had nothing to do with you doing your job at the workplace, seemingly, although the accusors lawyers are refusing to share details.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-new-yorker-severs-ties-with-star-reporter-ryan-lizza

So basically, from now on, men can only work for liberal publications or serve as politicians for liberal political parties if they've never done anything to piss off a woman.

In other words, insofar as PR is a part of the organizations we rely upon for our careers, we now all have to be as squeaky clean as politicians. Or even more so it seems, if we are always to trust the judgement of said organizations to weight truth and not just paper over details so long as good public relations are maximally preserved.

The left is starting to look a lot like the religious right.

Are you suggesting that Condé Nast fired and publicly slandered one of their top journalists without investigating the claims made against him?

RJ, it seems like your position is--absent public evidence--to disbelieve accusers? Or only when the accused is liberal?

It's ok, it's only happening because a Republican who's sexually assaulted women is the president, and because liberals think that if they eat their own, they'll occupy the high moral ground, and that will make it easier to remove the president from office. It'll stop as soon as he gets the boot.

On the bright side, at least we got to relive this:

I'm really trying hard to imagine what happens in the alternative timeline where Hillary Clinton is president, Harvey Weinstein gets outed as a serial rapist, and an avalanche of firings and resignations occur. What happens in the HRC administration? Does Bill become a pariah in the White House and quietly and unceremoniously cease to have any kind of public role? Or do feminists decide that it's no longer an authentic feminist position to say that HRC should not be held accountable for her husbands misdeeds, and begin to call her an enabler of Bill's sexual assault, so HRC divorces Bill to maintain her credibility? Or does the Democratic Party react by turning against its feminist supporters as #MeToo gains steam, and defend Bill with the same sort of cynical arguments Gloria Steinem made during the Monica Lewinsky scandal?

Sounds way more interesting than the timeline we're living in. But thinking about how implausible nearly every single one of those scenarios is (although I'd still bet on option number 3) brings home how Trump is the motivation behind the entire movement. If HRC were president, I doubt this would be happening. Every time a liberal reporter or politician or whatever is fired from his job, someone somewhere thinks we're one step closer to removing the president from office. We're not. That's what happens when you elect a shameless man to office.

The accusor hasn't told us what he did to her, and the only two parties that are privy to that who have said anything to the public about it are Lizza, and his ex-employer (which didn't disclose anything at all).

Whether or not he actually did anything wrong, Lizza's question to the New Yorker remains: what did he do to violate company policy? Also, maybe she is truthful, or maybe she is getting her revenge on him for ****ty but legal behavior toward her. But we'll never know, unless you take a PR paranoid publication for their word.

You say "we'll never know" but everything else you've posted sounds like you've made up your mind already, it seems like. e.g. they're only inordinately "P.R. paranoid" if we assume they fired him without cause. Right?

Can we take Lizza at his word when he rhetorically asks what company policy he violated?

He may well have done something bad or even illegal to this woman. But it seems like a personal dispute, and I am waiting to see evidence that it has anything to do with his professional capacity as a writer for the New Yorker.

This seems to mostly have to do with fire at will employment: the New Yorker doesn't want people working for them if something doesn't smell right about them.

What I am saying is this: it's not that I don't believe the accusors by default ( you suggest because the accused is liberal). Rather what I am suggesting is that if she had a case against him, I would have less skepticism if she went to the police first instead of just trying to get him fired from his job.

I will take back everything I say if it comes out that either:

• the accusor did in fact go to the police first, or
• his position at The New Yorker made her vulnerable to his advances. As far as I know we don't even know if she worked for the New Yorker, or if she was just a woman he dated.