We’re humans. Sometimes people tell the truth, sometimes people lie. Due process needs to be given for any allegation, or else we’re back to the days of mob justice killing innocent people.
Why do women always portray themselves as helpless in these scenarios? What if, faced with a threat to her dog or certain ego death, she pulls a 38 out of her purse and explains that actions have consequences?
Because, using Emma's duopoly approach, they are trying to be GI Jane and helpless victims at the same time. Sometimes "you can't have it both ways" is the logical answer.
I've interacted with many women face to face in my lifetime, Emma. And I've come to learn that, like men, they are human and thus subject to the same potential for both greatness and for malicious selfishness. And, like men, if they are put in a position of entitlement, many of them will give into the temptation to use to try and dominate and control others, or hurt people who displease them in the least.
You are not arguing with people who have no life experience; to the the contrary, you are debating with people who know human nature in general quite well. Such people know that we do not live in a black and white world where only one particular group of people are capable of abusing power if given the means and motivation.
Your problem “ Emma” is that you don’t actually “think”. You fantasize doing do but it is an illusion in your brain. And perhaps YOU should get out of your misandrist circle and meet other people, “it would be good for you to interact with humans face to face every once in a while”.
Of course your “victim” can file a police report. You think anyone is going to believe her or take it to a trial? Seriously, you’ve got some life experience yet to earn.
Nice how you prove that your clarity of thought is not marred by emotion, Emma. Now the insults start, without any rational points behind them, you prove my contention.
And btw, Emma, I in fact *do not* think that trans women who are biologically men regardless of their inner feelings or level of hormonal and surgical alteration and should not be competing against the average women athlete in professional sports and I have argued against it here and elsewhere.
I don't think that's what he said, Emma. To use a less extreme example, in the current climate I think the woman in your scenario could have more easily coerced the man to not only sleep with her, but to give her money etc simply by threatening to *accuse* him of something. And if it was merely her word against his, she would be well aware that the public would be more likely to sympathize with her than him, with too many of them not actually caring whether she told the truth or not because the "message" was more important to them than actual right or wrong. And I think that is the main point here.
No, for fuck’s sake. You put the rabbit in the hat: You assume the guy will carry through. You don’t know that and neither did your “victim”. She consented to sex, plain and simple but it was voluntary, consensual sex. Her life was not in danger. Allegedly her dog’s was. If she said “no” that’d be one thing. She did not. She - in your fantasized notion - lacked a belief in her own agency. Who is to blame for that? Oh, I know, “The Patriarchy”. God help any males in your life, Emma. Get out while you can guys.
No one said that, Emma. What your detractors here are saying is that identifying any particular group of people as Victims as a form of identity demarcation and thus empowering them to destroy the lives of people from another group simply by making an accusation is not conducive to actual justice. Saying that anyone here is seriously arguing that a woman deserves to be raped via coercion simply for making a bad judgment makes it clear that you are inflamed by emotion and motivated by hatred of men, so you interpret statements far out of reasonable context to make a case against due process. Smearing one particular group of people and trying to actually form a legal legitimacy for it has never gone well for any society in history that has adopted it, which is why you are receiving such a degree of opposition from people who are not unduly influenced by emotion and bitterness towards one particular group of people.
Let us also keep in mind that you said, in all seriousness, that you think it's "very common" for men in general to behave this way and make casual and even strange threats to women to get them to comply with sex ("I'll kill your dog if you don't do what I want!"). But you have no issues with a legal and political climate in which women are enabled and even motivated to make frivolous accusations against men who simply may not have complied with their will because you think it's okay to just *assume* someone is guilty to ensure that the actual guilty people get punished... but only if those people happen to be men. That suggests a strong emotional bias towards men and an extreme level of favoritism towards women. This causes you to inadvertently make a strong case to everyone with objective reasoning that justice needs to be impartial.
No, midwit, you completely failed to understand my point, which is that I have a high enough opinion of women to expect them to exercise good judgement and avoid placing themselves in obviously dangerous situations.
Your top comment amounted to "hey when women are mistreated sexually by shitheads, it's only natural that there will be a groundswell of accusations, some of which will yeah be life-ruining and some will be against innocent people, but them's the breaks when some men are shitheads"
I'm sick to fucking death of this bullshit idea, first mainstreamed by the sexual revolution, that people (women and men) can indulge every variety of promiscuity they can dream up and also are entitled to experience no consequences. It wasn't true then and it's not true now. It never has been which is why there have been socially imposed constraints on sexual behavior for a hundred thousand generations of humans. I know immature children who cannot control their appetites or accept responsibility (not entirely their fault because they were raised in a miasma of bullshit around this topic) think it's just Big Meanie Trying To Oppress Them but the truth is that sexual anarchy HURTS PEOPLE, including and maybe especially women. Women who are told by the culture that "hey man the problem is no one is TeAchIng boYs NOt to RaPE hurr durr go be seksually free and open and empowered just men should like totally be Good Men it's their fault" and then try to rely on the criminal justice system, which you correctly point out is not designed to respond appropriately when a date goes wrong, are so painfully fucking naive and it's hurting people.
So. We fix this like this. Women: Don't fuck men you don't know well enough to know whether you can trust them or not, and don't lie about it when you do. You could even be wild and crazy and go so far as to only have sex within a committed and exclusive relationship and only get into those with people of good character which you find out by getting to know that person over a period of time which we called in the olden days "dating" and was not generally marked by jumping in to bed the first time you met the person. This is an example of making good decisions for yourself, not bad ones, and not whining that Daddy down at the police precinct didn't fix everything when you trusted the wrong guy (and hot tip: a guy who fucks any woman who invites him into her bed is the wrong guy).
Yes, this is slut shaming, but I shame because I care. This has to stop. Other kinds of sexual misbehavior have other solutions but the 'hey I had this guy in my bed and he turned out to be an asshole!' is easy to fix. 95% of that goes away when women use the tools at their disposal to filter who has sexual access to them. This is not rocket science.
Due Process and the presumption of innocence are hallmarks of the justice system for good reason. While many of the #metoo stories were heart-wrenching, the Believe All Women mantra went down in flames after Tara Reade and other gold diggers started popping up.
2. Hillary Clinton said all women should be believed (Except of course if they are accusing Bill.) I bet she regretted that as soon as it came out of her mouth.
And unless they are accusing Joe Biden, of course. The mainstream liberal #MeToo crowd was more than happy to demand due process consideration for men operating on their side of the political aisle, with one liberal female journalist going so far as to say that she believed Tara Reade's accusation but was going to support Biden anyway because he was a Democrat and thus better than any possible Republican. The hypocrisy and double standards of such people are off the scale, which is why we do not take them seriously when they claim their movement is all about justice and not about subjective entitlement or as a political tool to destroy men that they dislike. This is why #MeToo lost its credibility: it ceased to recognize nuance, subjectivity, its capability of being misused & weaponized, and the fact that hatred of men could cause it to get way of control.
The woke mindset can only see women as helpless victims of male predation or oppression, but never as duplicitous and very manipulative individuals who know exactly what they're doing to get what they want. Not all women are averse to sex with men to get ahead or thoroughly disgusted by the prospect of doing so.
So, it is utterly untrue that the only reason a woman would make such a transaction is if they were under extreme duress or desperation; this depends on the individual woman, and women in such industries as entertainment and politics are well aware of fellow women who do not mind the casting couch, so to speak. Some of them find this to be a useful tool in the ultra-competitive world of capitalism, and this can give them an unfair leg up over women with more demure sensibilities who would not sleep with a man to get an advantaged position in the industry. The women-centric #MeToo mentality does not recognize this as part of their worldview, however, which gives some women with the lack of aversion I described above the privilege (yes, that is the appropriate word) to trade sex for favors in certain industries and then accuse one or more of the men whom she made such a transaction with of foul play if the deal later goes sour for them -- like if they are later fired for reasons, justified or not, that have nothing to do with the men involved in the transaction. Then they blame the industry for being sexist, and fingerpoint the mean they made those transactions with as being examples of "male predatory behavior," with the implication that they only did what they had to do but were disgusted by having to do it, and only because the man manipulated them into doing it, or threatened them, or claiming they were "naive" and taken advantage of, etc. This is why all such cases and claims need to be verified with good evidence, because the woke mentality ignores female complicity in any type of situation and only focuses on the men. In actuality, female power has always been strong, and they can easily weaponize their sexuality and attractiveness for personal gain, much as men in positions of power can do with money.
Right there is a glaring injustice in your comment. You don’t believe Tara Reade, maybe because her accusation was against someone on your side of the political bent, I don’t know the reason, regardless you paint her as a “gold digger”. You have no idea of the truth behind her story though, none of us do. It’s his word against hers.
I don't know if I believe Tara Reade or not because I have no idea what evidence there may have been. However, based on her willingness to irrationally destroy others without Due Process, I am betting that Emma is a Joe Biden supporter and was unwilling to believe Reade's allegations, thus showing her hypocrisy. You might notice that she completely dodged that question...
Hi, JAE. To be fair to both you and Charles's statements: for what it's worth, I personally think that Tara Reade has a better case than other accusers. I have seen examples of how little respect Biden has for the boundaries of girls and women on more than one instance of captured video, and this bit of evidence right there makes her accusation more credible. Obviously, many women are going to be telling the truth with their accusations, because men in power *do* all too often abuse that power. No argument there.
However, I think the point Charles may have been making is that women are also human and thus equally capable of abusing their power to destroy the lives of people they dislike -- whether it be for personal, political, or financial motivations -- *if* they find themselves in a position of either individual power or widespread socially conferred power due to their identity (either via immutable characteristics or choice of religion etc). This is what happened when the *MeToo movement became weaponized by liberals based on the pervasiveness of identity politics, in this case specifically the mainstream liberal iteration of it.
As a result, we find ourselves in a defensive position where we are hyper-aware of how many women in such a climate will take advantage of this, based not only on the number of frivolous accusations that have been proven but based on our knowledge of how human nature works, i.e., the inability of any group of people to handle disproportionate power well.
That said, I fully agree that such accusations need to be treated on a case-by-base basis, because there is a good chance that either the man or the woman in such cases might be lying. And, as Charles noted, the motivation of financial gain is, sadly, a very big form of motivation, which is why so many civil court lawyers are jumping on the #MeToo bandwagon.
I NEVER believed Tara Reade because ALL the evidence pointed to Reade being both a nut and a grifter, which she was!
‘Manipulative, deceitful, user’:
Tara Reade left a trail of aggrieved acquaintances
A number of those who crossed paths with Biden’s accuser say they remember two things: She spoke favorably about her time working for Biden, and she left them feeling duped.
Also, does a system of "justice" based on guilt by assumption because of your demographic less deserving of being put in quotes than one based on due process? Have mainstream liberals seriously come up with a better alternative than being required to weigh the evidence and investigate in an impartial manner to ensure that an innocent person is less likely of being indicted? The authoritarian and emotionalistic direction that liberalism has taken over the past few decades is truly disturbing to anyone with an objective respect for civil rights.
I’m thinking you may not be ready for the objective thought necessary to comprehend that people's lives should not be destroyed simply on the word of another. Yes, crimes often go unpunished, but that's no reason to break out the torches and pitchforks, or to make smug little comments such as yours...
On what planet does a rapist escape justice based solely on his claim of innocence. What criminal doesn't proclaim his innocence? That's simply not the way our system works. But it does require victim to be a complaining witness. Which is the least one would demand - unless you believe that innuendo and baseless allegations are all that should be needed for a conviction. Should I be able to say that Emma assaulted me without any evidence of injury or your whereabouts?
All most people are saying here is that due process is important. A single accusation with no proof should not condemn a person to punishment. That’s all.
And yet, at the same time, good and honorable men have been accused and shamed by venal, vengeful and deceitful women. If you think one gender has a monopoly on venality, I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale.
Ninety seven percent of violent crimes are committed by men; I'd say that's pretty damn close to a gender-based monopoly. And now some men (and the women who enable them) are trying to skew those stats by allowing violent offenders to choose their gender.
Here's a prime example from the NY TImes:
(Spoiler alert: "She" is actually a He who identified as a He while committing these murders!)
She Killed Two Women. At 83, She is Charged With Dismembering a Third.
Harvey Marcelin was charged with murder after a head was found in her Brooklyn apartment. Officials said it belonged to a dismembered body discovered in a shopping cart.
Thank you for crediting me with a system that has evolved since Magna Carta and before. Sorry to say it's the best we have, and, if done judiciously, carefully and honestly, it usually leads to the correct result. You seem to be happier with a system based on rumor, innuendo and aspersions of guilt cast in the shadows?
So do women; lie all the time, to get what they want.
By far the most cruelty I have ever endured is from jealous, insecure mean girls.
I would rather take a punch from a man - that physical pain ends in 30 seconds. With mean-girls, enduring the passive, aggressive whisper campaigns, of a bunch of jealous girls who want to socially and economically destroy the female who dare challenges them, is never-ending.
Human nature is really complicated and women have agency. Lots of agency.
Putting Louis CK and Harvey Weinstein in the same category of sexual predators demonstrates how you flattened all women into a single victim category, that is nicely tied up in a #metoo bow.
Just because you haven't figured out how to conceive of yourself as anything but a victim, doesn't mean the rest of us have to submit to your conception.
Men built civilization and now women are busy administering its decline.
A man and a woman are in bed about to have sex...He says something horrible and she starts to leave, he says something else horrible and she stays, submits...She has been raped.
So if he'd just kept his mouth shut, she wouldn't have been raped, just screwed by an asshole, but because he said something she didn't like, she gets to condemn him as a rapist? Look, she's clearly an idiot, he's clearly an asshole. IMO, society should banish both of them, there is no benefit to having either around.
What if they had sex first, and then he said something horrible and she left, was she raped?
She could have left. She could have avoided having sex if she chose to. She submitted.
Clearly a woman who would otherwise have sex with a guy, but who hears something she doesn't like is not the same type of victim as a woman who is accosted in a parking lot and forcibly raped.
If someone told me I had the choice between being accosted in a parking lot and forcibly raped by some stranger and losing my dog, I may give a different answer if I were asked that instead of the former, I had to have sex with someone that I would have otherwise had sex with, except they said things I didn't like first.
You think guys don't have sex with women that say things they don't want to hear? LOL.
Maybe I am awful, but at least I wouldn't entrap a person and accuse them of rape when it could have very easily been avoided.
Rape is a very serious crime, your comical exploitation of what a rape is demeans the people that have actually been raped. Grow up and stop hanging out with truly awful people.
Emma, I think the comprehension issue stems from not having enough information …
1) Was this a one night pickup, or did these 2 adults know each other beforehand?
2) Where did it take place? If in her home, was her dog present?
3) Etc.
Listen, I’m not discounting your obviously passionate presentation of a scenario where a woman submits to sex under threat, but to be fair to those questioning or discounting the charge of rape is legitimate without knowing more surrounding the circumstances.
Emma's argument against your reasonable requests, Honey, would likely be that because the man can say it was consensual whether it wasn't or not, because the woman could not prove this in a court of law we need to assume he was guilty to make sure he doesn't get away with it. Her rationale against due process is that men are "often" like this, and the law and society needs to consider that men need special restrictions and women special protections (read: entitlements coupled with a condescending lack of agency). She says that men "often" bully women into giving them sex, yet the truly Orwellian degree of checkpoints mainstream liberals like her impose to make it all but impossible for a man to be in a position where the consent of a woman he had sex with to be either legally or socially recognized is one of the most severe forms of overt bullying one can ever see.
It's a form of pre-emptive bullying to stop someone whom you presume must be a bully just because of the demographic they belong to. She loathes men so she always wants them in a position where they can be destroyed, and to regulate the sex lives of men and women for the alleged benefit of the latter. This, of course, will create a situation where a third party can accuse a man of coercion or bullying to receive sex even if the woman he was with does not agree.
Rape is so common in your eyes because you consider so many normal and common interactions to be rape or coercion. You can make any type of crime seem "common" if you conveniently broaden the definition of it widely enough.
The fact that you think cajoling is a rape is why you believe that rape is so common. The fact that you think seduction is rape may also be why you believe there are so many rapes.
People like you do a grave disservice to people trying to affect change for women (and men) when dealing with power struggles in the workplace and elsewhere.
She revoked and then consented again. IMO. This is what is known as a question of fact to be determined by the chosen trier of fact - i.e. a judge or a jury. All of the rest of us are just offering our opinion on the facts presented. I think you are saying she complied after the dog statement out of fear. But that fear must be reasonable. I do not think it is as presented. And I love dogs BTW.
I'm not saying this couldn't happen, but there is always a temptation to come up with unlikely possibilities and then make them central examples that drive policies and mores that mostly don't make a lot of sense.
"... there is always a temptation to come up with unlikely possibilities and then make them central examples that drive policies and mores that mostly don't make a lot of sense."
Agreed and well stated. That would be like Emma's chosen example of a man threatening to kill a woman's dog unless she has sex with him, and then saying that it's "very common" for men to do such things, with the implications that it's equally common for women to be so wussy that they actually comply with the threat instead of taking action against it. This is the essence of the Victim ideology: it not only demonizes men but it infantalizes women in a condescending way. When you use such unlikely examples and then call them likely, you're just begging for rational and objective people to come out in defense of a suspect that prefers to investigate such claims rather than just assuming they're true to make sure the guy goes to jail just in case he is guilty.
The woman gets to decide whether or not this was rape.
Rape is a strong word, and should be.
She would learn more from the incident if she saw that she needed to make some changes in her life, like getting to know someone better before having sex, like loving herself more. If she recognized that she had a part in what happened, then her life improves. Not, not, not that she was to blame, but that her choices played a part. I say this from experience, having come of age in the '70s.
Rape victims of war, that's a different matter, for example.
What you are trying to do here, Emma, is criminalize or demonize common forms of persuasion utilized by both genders to acquire sex from someone they are attracted to. And it's all based on demanding that men jump through a series of hoops before a woman can say yes, but putting women in the position of being forced to hold up those hoops or be labeled a victim.
You say "most" men have done this? You put so many caveats on the road to acquiring consent that meets your very stringent standards on this that you ignore the fact that many women have "goaded" and "cajoled" men they are interested in the same way, but you only consider it an issue if men do it. This is because you want almost any woman to be in a position where she can easily get a man who displeases her in any way accused since he failed to mark one of the hundred boxes of criteria you expected him to check off in order for it to be considered proper "consent." And you pretend to see no way this can be weaponized or based on a truly negative opinion of men in general?
Then you find it strange that you're getting such a backlash from anyone who has control of their emotions and do not hate men.
You posit an absurdly-contrived situation, declare it to be "incredibly common" and then imply that the entire framework of the criminal justice be retooled as if this were the norm rather than the vanishingly-rare exception, without acknowledging the obvious side effects that would have.
And I see from some of your other comments that you're basically expanding the definition of rape to include any situation in which a woman objectively consents to sex but on some level would rather not do it. I've had sex in situations where I would have preferred not to. Like, I was tired from a long day and really just wanted to go to sleep, but she wanted to so I did it anyway because you do things like this in relationship. I never felt remotely raped.
And perhaps more directly analogous to your examples, I have had sex with women under emotional coercion. Someone I was trying to disengage from, who understood that I was trying to disengage from her, and who telegraphed the intense pain that that would cause her. I didn't want to inflict that pain on someone I cared for, so kept postponing the inevitable. (And as I'm sure you know, this is a very common relationship tactic that both men and women use).
But this wasn't rape. Rather, it was a failure on my part to maintain proper boundaries. Most of the situations that you describe in your comments are failures to maintain boundaries, and it's very counterproductive to conflate them with rape, and not just because of the obvious damage that it does to the non-rapist man. If you actually want to help women in these situations, it's much more fruitful to teach them how to maintain proper boundaries than it is to exonerate them from all responsibility and thus agency. Particularly since if she has difficulty maintaining proper sexual boundaries, she's also probably being walked over in other aspects of her life as well. And of course it also wouldn't hurt to explain to her that it's probably not a great idea to bring home the type of man who's going to threaten her if for whatever reason she decides to back out of having sex.
Professional.experience? If so you have lost your objectivity. Personal experience? Is so it is consuming you. Both? If so, both. It is not that your position(s) lack merit. It is that you make emotional arguments. Profane emotional arguments. Rarely are those effective.
Your sort of "Metoo" happened because a bunch of hysterics apparently prefer a system of "justice" more akin to Salem circa 1691 than a system based on facts and provable allegations.
Just wanted to say, Bruce, that in following this thread and the impressive back and forth you're having with Emma (from both of you), it appears your Sunday was a helluva a lot more exciting than mine..
Emma was a good sport. I think she took more fire than necessary.
Oddly after our dialogue I saw that some Hollywood dork was successfully sued for millions by an aspiring young woman he lured back to his room. So even without a criminal case there may be the very justice for true victims that Emma seeks.
Metoo happened because people act like because you can’t prove something happened beyond a reasonable doubt means it didn’t happen.
*****
No. It means the criminal justice system cannot act on whatever happened.
You seem to have a stilted view of our justice system. It is the result of thousands of years of refinement. People had wives daughters and sisters that they wanted protected. They also wanted to make sure that the innocent were not found guilty. You seem like you are letting the perfect (as you see it) be the enemy of the good. Work to refine our system not condemn it because it isn’t perfect in your eyes.
Please, no condescending attacks against those who question you. It takes away your credibility. Common Sense / Bari invite us to a place where we can agree to question and agree to disagree. Be civil & respectful!
"I’m not saying it’s a bad standard, I’m saying that it leaves most victims of rape without recourse to justice, and that makes them angry, which is also totally fucking natural."
And your repetitive inability to suggest an alternative suggests that I may not be the only pile of bricks here. Moreover the notion that "most victims of rape are without recourse to justice" is completely unsupported. I suspect that's because your definition of "rape" has little to do with the actual crime of rape.
Unless you were there and had ful context and perspective, or unless you are God, you don't know whether a crime has been committed, let alone if it was a particular man.
What is the "impossible standard of evidence" to which you are referring? The law doesn't say what evidence is required. It merely establishes that the evidence be reasonable and necessary to prove guilt. What standard would you impose?
I don't agree with this example, Emma, especially not as an argument that due process can be a bad thing. You gave a scenario where a woman was very clearly coerced, which is extortion, and thus a form of rape, and hence should be punished by law. You also mention, understandably, that this may amount to a "his word against hers" sort of scenario that cannot be easily proven. But that in no way justifies the erasure of due process and the replacement of it with mob "justice," because when you throw that very important aspect of American jurisprudence out the window, you create a scenario where it becomes increasingly common for angry and bitter women who were not actually raped to lie based on a rejection, resentment because they didn't get everything they wanted out of a relationship or interaction, financial motivations, or simply on the basis of mental illness. Empowering a group of people to do such things with reckless abandon is not justice by any sane definition of the word.
Also, saying that such a scenario as you described is "incredibly common"? I disagree, and I think that is a hyperbolic assumption based on an implicit hatred of all men on the basis of what some have done. Admittedly, more men will do such things in an environment where they are in positions of entitlement. However, that is true of *all* human beings, and you do not rectify that by simply inverting the entitlement factor and arguing that it's okay to destroy people's lives because you think people from that group will destroy the lives of those from another group. That's a classic example of allowing Peter to slit Paul's throat so that Paul won't do it first.
Finally, I disagree that there is "no hope" of finding justice in such situations. Very, very few men (or anyone else) who engage in such predatory behavior do it just once, and never again. They establish observable patterns of behavior, and these can build up and be used against them as damning character evidence. Of course, multiple accusers do not always suggest guilt, as there can be other factors that motivate at least some of those multiple accusations, including monetary motives and satisfying a need for attention that people with certain emotional problems have, which is why such accusations need to be investigated thoroughly and why realistic amounts of evidence must be there.
This process will not always be perfect, but we can mitigate it by making certain that no group of people (whether men, women, or otherwise) have a disproportionately strong ability to hurt or coerce others.
But of course #MeToo is far, far more than a "cry of rage." It's a demand for very serious real world consequences based solely on a woman's say-so. Assume that there'd never been a Depp/Heard trial, but only Depp's allegations of abuse by Heard. What, according to you, should have been her punishment? Prison? Monetary damages? Loss of a job and job opportunities? All of the above? None? Those are things #MeToo demand men suffer solely due to the accusations of women, and many of them often do. Not exactly just a "cry of rage."
Amber Heard is a very, very prominent example of something that has become all too widespread thanks to the weaponizing of #MeToo by liberals. It was created by liberals during an era when they have gone off the rails with authoritarianism, and that alone renders its motivations suspect from the get-go. Especially when some of its main architects took a very hypocritical stance on it once a man they supported (Joe Biden) was accused. Then the calls for due process came out. Not because they necessarily thought Biden was innocent, but because he was a Democrat. This is how identity politics and political exceptionalism works in terms of actual justice. It's all about who you are and what you identify with, not whether your accusation actually has merit in its own right.
In your scenario she submitted. Women can't, and shouldn't, have it both ways. One is either strong enough to do the right thing (say no AND protect their dog) or women are a weaker sex in need of protection, in which case the notion of equality is a myth. Sheluyeng is right about due process. I am weary of starlets who engaged in sex to further their careers and then crying victim 10, 20, 30 years later. Personally I think it is wrong to engage in sex as a career move period, but failing to complain timely ultimately denies due process.
That does not even make sense. If a guy says I will kill you if you don't have sex with me, that is a threat. And the use thereof constitutes rape. If he says I will kill your child or your family then to be reasonable he would have to have the ability to carry it out to be reasonable. With the ability to carry it out that is likely rape. The reasonableness of I will kill your dog as a threat is a question of fact to be determined by a finder of fact - a judge or a jury. If he harmed the dog before the act it would be a stronger case but even then.the fear would still be of harm to yourself - if he harmed my dog, what will he do to me? In other words there is a perceived threat without it being uttered. Maybe the same Argument could be made just on the basis of the threat to harm the dog but my instinct is that a successful prosecution would need more information (he had a weapon, he grabbed the dog). But who let's a whackadoodle like this in their home with their (presumably) small, fragile pets?
I did try to understand your POV: which seems to be that since it's difficult, in your eyes, to use actual evidence to find out if an accusation is likely to be true, that means women often cannot find justice for real crimes against them. So, what is your solution? Eliminate due process and always assume that a woman is telling the truth in the total absence of any evidence "just in case"? I'm sorry, Emma, but your stated believe that men are very frequently doing things like this reveals your bias against men, which is why you want a system to justice to favor one gender over the other.
The same is of course true of all sorts of things, not just men and women, and not just about sexual matters. Two people are talking about a business deal, one of them backs out, the other reveals his Mafia connections and threatens to kill the first one's dog, the first one relents and does the business deal. It's unjust, it's hard to prove, things like this have happened many times.
We don't suspend the rules of due process for this example either.
Even accepting all the ugliness of the many unsolved crimes in our society, most of which are not rape, the presumption of innocence, due process, and the rule of law are still far better than the alternative.
I concur, John. Emma's POV, however, is based on the assumption that men are so disproportionately awful and capable of crimes against women than the reverse that the justice system needs to be skewed in favor of a woman's word even in the absence of substantive evidence, because otherwise a lot of guilty men will go free.
That may be (maybe she says it somewhere in the other comments). It's a common point of view. This is a strategy for people trying to undo the foundations of liberal democracy: life isn't fair for my group so let's burn down the whole system. Even if those propositions were true, it still wouldn't be much of an argument (what's the alternative?).
Of course, these propositions are not true, and the reality is that all sorts of people bear injustice and that women are not special, nor is whatever other minority group someone might use as an example.
Agreed. She makes her attitude towards men quite clear throughout her posts by pointing out extreme scenarios, which started with a man coercing a woman to have sex with him by threatening to kill her dog if she doesn't comply -- and then saying that this is "very common." Yes, I'm not making that up. The rest of her posts contain classic SJW tropes and terms.
Her point, like all SJWs (of either gender and all gender identities) seems to be, "let's modify the system so it has a clear bias in favor of women over men, because men are much more awful than women, and because of that, he is so likely to have been guilty of the accusation she made against him that we need to always believe her just to make sure that he goes to jail if he's guilty, otherwise she fail to find justice."
And she doesn't like the fact that due process requires evidence rather than assumptions of guilt based on gender or similar arbitrary biases, since she feels it's a given that men are terrible and that women are very unlikely to lie. Of course, the likelihood of someone from any demographic lying increases in direct proportion to how much favoritism both the law and the general public gives to them for that arbitrary, sentimental reason. People in general lie all the time, and we can't give them further impetus to do so with arbitrary forms of leniency and favoritism. That's not seeking justice and fairness, it's seeking privilege and exceptional power. She also wants the caveats of consent to be so rigid that it's easy for a woman to retroactively take away consent if in retrospect she comes to the conclusion (possibly convinced by others) that she was somehow coerced into it and didn't make actually make the choice under her own volition. It's not hard to see how many cans of worms that opens up.
It can also be used against women by denying them agency if a third party decides to intervene for personal reasons or if that third person has an agenda against a certain man and woman making a connection.
And what is her suggested alternative to due process? All SJWs tend to be pretty vague on that for obvious reasons. They make it clear by implication what the alternative should be, which is why they simply tear down the existing system. Autocratic thinkers do not like due process for good reason.
I think what Josh actually meant was that people of both genders need to own their decisions from an ethical standpoint. That is in no way saying that women who are actually raped because of a bad choice means that the man should not be legally accountable. But if a woman has consensual sex with a man, and then later decides that she regrets it for a variety of factors, she can't just decide that it wasn't consensual retroactively. That's why it's important to investigate and figure out what actually happened rather than always taking the word of the accuser because they're part of a protected class of people, or because due process makes it difficult for a simple accusation to indict someone (of a non-protected class).
The woman who's been sexually assaulted and can't get the assaulter prosecuted would be more analogous to a situation where a man is falsely accused and can't get the accuser prosecuted for filing a false report. In the direct analogy, he's not in jail, but he has been wronged by a liar and may suffer some severe consequences in the social realm, which are compounded by his inability to get justice.
And if we change the analogy to this more fair comparison, then I'd agree with your conclusion. It sucks to be the falsely accused person, but there is an element of personal responsibility in having picked a bad partner. And even to the extent that the situation was unavoidable, I don't know what solution the legal system can offer.
There is no need, however, to forestall feeling sorry for people because bad things happen to them. I feel sorry for a lot of people who can't get justice through the legal system.
Men and women should be able to complete on exactly the same field, the same pool, the same court, etc. Eliminate men-only sports leagues and women-only sports leagues. Let the athletes, regardless of sexist or gender compete on the same physical field and event. The strongest, fastest, most athletic should compete against the strongest, fastest, most athletic and those that aren’t good enough to compete against them on the same level can have their own league. Oh shit wait.
I have no problem with women competing in predominantly men's sports if they can prove they have the same strength capabilities. That would be only a small number, however. Of course, sports like football are different from the fighting sports. A woman in a physical sport like football would need to be able to take hits as well as run fast, or she could be in serious trouble. And the majority of women are too light to deal with blows from men who typically weigh in excess of 200 pounds.
Sometimes it's not about sheer skill, but strength. If everything else is equal, then strength matters. Personally, having experience in martial arts, I wouldn't mind women competing against men, because despite the fact that men are typically stronger in the upper body, and thus hit harder, women are typically faster and have more stamina than men, and this balances things out.
A featherweight boxer would be faster than a heavyweight, and may be able to land more punches, but the heavyweight will typically hit harder and inflict more damage, and could also take more blows. This could even out depending on the fighters, but the rule system in a competitive fighting sport tends to place a preference on fighters who are as close to equal in strength and therefore potential hitting power as possible.
BIPOC pan gender- they put everything in one poor victim. Sounds like a great movie from the outset. Although I love Cate Blanchett and classical music this is going to be a no from me.
Aren't we bored yet with movies (and cultural influences) that ask us to agonize over someone else's guilt. I'd like to see a movie that asks us to agonize over whether judgment is really ours to mete out, and if so whether it's a satisfying use of energy.
It’s interesting to me that this story of Cancel Culture and I’m assuming (otherwise is there really a movie?) a grey area of exploitation is nested in the world of Classical Music, that most elite of artistic communities. I haven’t seen the movie-it appeals to me on zero levels. But I wonder if the many facets and potential redeeming features (genius, a hinted at mental disorder) would be treated with again an assumed-(again apologies)-ambiguity if this tale had been set in the less elite world of say, Monster Truck racing.
intelligence and intellectual sofistication breed more emotional complexity.
That is the point.
Monster Truck settings , whatever that is btw, doubtfully would be a ground for posing questions on human behavior juxtapositions shown in the movie ...
intelligence and intellectual sofistication breed more emotional complexity.’
Genuinely find this comment breathtaking Leah. It harks back to the idea of regular people deferring to their ‘betters’. That regular, ‘uneducated’ people are incapable of experiencing a full range of emotions.
It seems where we stand politically these days can be simplified thus. Are regular people-the masses- actually beasts? Beast who, without the intervention of their intellectual and moral superiors, would descend into a cesspool of racism and violence? Or are regular people quite capable of making their own choices, and voting in their own best interests, even if they, like me, are philistine enough to value video games over opera?
Elite minds are the minds that have got us into the worst recession in memory, a massive crime wave, and a tanking economy. Maybe they are not quite as elite minded as they tell themselves.
And yes, you are correct, leadership breeds errors bc it's a human action., Assuming we leave personal corruption aside for a sec, those who dare to lead are definitely more courageous than the complacent ones.
Perhaps. Sometimes leadership takes courage. Sometimes what masquerades as leadership is merely about becoming the mouthpiece for orthodoxy and group think that only serves the status quo and vested interests.
But your original comment was, and forgive me if I have misunderstood, that elite minds are somehow more complex intellectually and/or emotionally than non elites. I reject that idea wholeheartedly.
I think you were referring to specific elitism - in the arena of artistic expression for example- and DE is referring to the concept of an individual being an "elite" in general and thus superior to the masses. I recognize elite athletes, elite scholars, elite musicians. I do not recognize any person as being a life-long member of an "elite" ruling class destined to make decisions for me or my fellow citizens. I find that unAmerican.
It’s because most people reading that will know that there is no such thing as ‘elite minds’ that possess ‘more emotional complexity’. They will take your comment as sarcasm.
Elite world? Movies are an elite world. Reality is more prosaic.
My daughter started violin as a child and now has a masters in violin performance, so I’ve logged a lot of hours as a bystander in the classical music world - at her lessons, auditions, concerts, music festivals.
Not to disparage anyone but based on my experience classical musicians are as likely to attend a monster truck rally as anyone else.
Maybe the credits are in the front to allow you to leave early.
Another social question. Did she or didn't she. In reality it's if those deep thinking lazy news people think you are with their human destroying causes or not. They will judge, jury, and destroy you. It's not about truth and justice. Look from Me Too, ANTIFA, BLM, or any of the other so called rights movement.
This might have been an interesting story 8 years ago. Today it just reminds you of how screwed up our society has become.
#MeToo has always been a difficult one for me to wrap my head around.
I suppose that's because I modeled in my late teens and early 20s and so was exposed to a lot of casting couch culture.
The barriers to entry to "glamour" jobs are _quite_ high, and I suppose—as I saw it then—colliding with the occasional obnoxious male was the vig you had to pay to play that game.
I don't know how I would see it now. But I _will_ say back then that I saw almost as many women manipulating their sexual availability to get ahead as I saw men taking advantage of reluctant women.
Back to "Tár "—so it's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" only with Mahler instead of Spanish nationalists? 😀
Ah, yes, it really does take two to tango, doesn't it? In this modern time, when women By God Control Their Bodies, the exchange of sex for advancement seems perfectly transactional, a bargain freely entered into, with both parties knowing the risk and rewards, and decided by both to be beneficial.
Well then, in the absence of forcible rape, it was incumbent upon the young ladies to keep their pants on and advance their careers on talent alone, wouldn't you say?
They either consented or they didn't, and if they did, it was in exchange for something of value. That's the definition of a free transaction - a transaction of a type with a long and storied career in the annals of men and women.
To the extent that other men got away with the same behaviors, he was also a scapegoat. But laws are almost always applied discriminatorily, no? And that discretion, more often than not, doesn't originate with the victims; it originates with the prosecutors.
There are a lot of parallels here between Weinstein and Andrew Cuomo. Both were widely detested and had reputations for being enormous bullies. But Cuomo was a terrifically good administrator, and Weinstein produced indie films that—gasp!—made actual money.
I couldn't tell you when the perceptions shifted. With Cuomo, I suspect he wasn't needed once the Democrats got Biden into the White House. With Weinstein, I don't know.
Personally, I don't think many of the accusations against Cuomo rise to the level of sexual harassment. But he was very unpopular, and this was a convenient way of bringing him down.
Same thing with Weinstein—except that what he did went _well_ beyond the level of harassment into very brutal sexual predation. But I have to think that people knew about his behavior for years, so it's the timing here that's really interesting.
I think that Weinstein was a pig and a predator but I wish someone could give me one solid example of a crime he committed. Does whining and begging for sex and promising great rewards amount to a crime? Or a business transaction? The guy was too fat and out of shape to actually chase, let alone catch, any of these attractive young women. I'm open to hear other takes but it looks like another show trial in our demented age of wokeness and Soviet-style denunciatory "justice."
Cuomo was also a pig but even less of a criminal. His trial should have been by the voters of New York. And I say this as someone with a deep dislike of Andrew Cuomo and his corruption of politics and government in New York.
One of the things the movie captured very well is the assistant (Franchesca) and the new cellist (Olga) not looking like victims at all. The Krista character's situation is more ambiguous (it might take some rewatching for me to figure out what the movie was even trying to say about her).
Or you could just watch a week’s worth of "Lauren Lake's Paternity Court" to decide #BelieveAllWomen or #BelieveAllMen is a farce. The DNA doesn't lie; many people do.
And as I recall the boy’s mother knew and gave it her tacit approval because she felt it was a cost worth paying for the doors the priest could open for the boy.
Well, here's yet ANOTHER Hollywood movie that I'll NEVER see in my lifetime. I'm sure it will get an Academy Award nomination but I'll never know. Who watches the Academy Awards anymore... especially with Jimmy Kimmel hosting it again this year? Yawn... so, on to something more interesting and exciting... "Honey, have we taken the dogs out to relieve themselves yet?"...
Sounds to me more like a glimpse into the death throes of a society that's gone soft with excess and mad with far too much time on its hands and little purposeful things with which to fill it. As someone else cogently observed, without the beauty of classical music contained in the film, there's little else to recommend it.
The movies have become either rehashes of other movies or comic book stuff. Rarely is there anything new because it appears Hollywood has run out of ideas. And you’re right, our society is in its death throes. We allow any number of outright public perversions to occur to our children while at the same time not requiring our children to excel.
We are entering a dark night i believe. People will be freezing this winter and I just don’t care. This is what the people want, they’ll get it good and hard. For the planet, of course.
while grateful for the film review, yes i have seen the movie and liked it immensely, I would disagree with the judgment on the film's aim.
I saw in it as painful story of injustice handled through a new/old "if- you-are-not-with- us-you-are-against-us" social behavior complacency requirement.
Dismissive of our precious individuality (especially for the gifted of us) and deep personal complexity associated with brilliance, the proper inquiry process tosses that proverbial child "with the water".
The aim of the so-called "cancel culture " is exactly that - distraction .
“Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” "At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first,...."
I'd be willing to bet that every established religion has a similar story. This story is compelling since one man stood against a mob and reminded them of their hypocrisy. "...the older ones first..." - the older you get the more you understand this.
"Dismissive of our precious individuality (especially for the gifted of us) and deep personal complexity associated with brilliance, the proper inquiry process tosses that proverbial child with the water'".
Did you mean to include yourself among "the gifted." And what makes one "gifted" or just "ordinary." Is an "ordinary" electrician who brilliantly diagnoses your circuits and restores power to your home not "gifted?" Should he not be honored for his "deep personal complexity?" If not, why not?
The slippery slope of elitist self reverence perhaps?
“Dismissive of our precious individuality (especially for the gifted of us) and deep personal complexity associated with brilliance,…”
This reads to me like justification for self-centeredness and narcissism. Like elites are so wrapped up in themselves and their perceived “brilliance” that they just can’t even.
I think Leah Kip's comment was meant to say we're always happy to dump on value creators - an activity that in itself delivers no value and is consequently self destructive and without substance.
That is circuitous. Who gets to say who is a "value creator"? The creator who puts it in the public stream or those who dump on the creator once the creator makes it available? Should the creator get a trophy for merely trying even if the observers of the content don't find value in it? BTW this is nothing new. It is why we have masterpieces made public long after the creator thereof has died.
Tchaikovsky suffered from “auditory hallucinations” as a child. The music wouldn’t let him sleep. Maybe it’s a device to show her musical bonifides, without announcing it, for those who know the story.
We’re humans. Sometimes people tell the truth, sometimes people lie. Due process needs to be given for any allegation, or else we’re back to the days of mob justice killing innocent people.
Amen 🙏
Telescope out a bit and maybe we can solve this. Why is a woman in bed with a man she can’t trust not to threaten to kill her dog?
Why do women always portray themselves as helpless in these scenarios? What if, faced with a threat to her dog or certain ego death, she pulls a 38 out of her purse and explains that actions have consequences?
I must agree with this, Futuristic. Yes, it's a bit extreme, but then so was Emma's example.
Because, using Emma's duopoly approach, they are trying to be GI Jane and helpless victims at the same time. Sometimes "you can't have it both ways" is the logical answer.
I've interacted with many women face to face in my lifetime, Emma. And I've come to learn that, like men, they are human and thus subject to the same potential for both greatness and for malicious selfishness. And, like men, if they are put in a position of entitlement, many of them will give into the temptation to use to try and dominate and control others, or hurt people who displease them in the least.
You are not arguing with people who have no life experience; to the the contrary, you are debating with people who know human nature in general quite well. Such people know that we do not live in a black and white world where only one particular group of people are capable of abusing power if given the means and motivation.
I get the feeling you really like the word “victim.”
Your problem “ Emma” is that you don’t actually “think”. You fantasize doing do but it is an illusion in your brain. And perhaps YOU should get out of your misandrist circle and meet other people, “it would be good for you to interact with humans face to face every once in a while”.
Of course your “victim” can file a police report. You think anyone is going to believe her or take it to a trial? Seriously, you’ve got some life experience yet to earn.
Right back at you Emma. Judge much?
And you accuse me of binary thinking......
Of if it’s a pit bull or trained attack chihuahua, that guy is in big trouble.
Good point!
Nice how you prove that your clarity of thought is not marred by emotion, Emma. Now the insults start, without any rational points behind them, you prove my contention.
And btw, Emma, I in fact *do not* think that trans women who are biologically men regardless of their inner feelings or level of hormonal and surgical alteration and should not be competing against the average women athlete in professional sports and I have argued against it here and elsewhere.
I don't think that's what he said, Emma. To use a less extreme example, in the current climate I think the woman in your scenario could have more easily coerced the man to not only sleep with her, but to give her money etc simply by threatening to *accuse* him of something. And if it was merely her word against his, she would be well aware that the public would be more likely to sympathize with her than him, with too many of them not actually caring whether she told the truth or not because the "message" was more important to them than actual right or wrong. And I think that is the main point here.
No, for fuck’s sake. You put the rabbit in the hat: You assume the guy will carry through. You don’t know that and neither did your “victim”. She consented to sex, plain and simple but it was voluntary, consensual sex. Her life was not in danger. Allegedly her dog’s was. If she said “no” that’d be one thing. She did not. She - in your fantasized notion - lacked a belief in her own agency. Who is to blame for that? Oh, I know, “The Patriarchy”. God help any males in your life, Emma. Get out while you can guys.
Because she likes the danger element.
Maybe she tried to get out of bed because he said he’d never kill her dog, buzzkill.
Who can say
Money usually
No one said that, Emma. What your detractors here are saying is that identifying any particular group of people as Victims as a form of identity demarcation and thus empowering them to destroy the lives of people from another group simply by making an accusation is not conducive to actual justice. Saying that anyone here is seriously arguing that a woman deserves to be raped via coercion simply for making a bad judgment makes it clear that you are inflamed by emotion and motivated by hatred of men, so you interpret statements far out of reasonable context to make a case against due process. Smearing one particular group of people and trying to actually form a legal legitimacy for it has never gone well for any society in history that has adopted it, which is why you are receiving such a degree of opposition from people who are not unduly influenced by emotion and bitterness towards one particular group of people.
Let us also keep in mind that you said, in all seriousness, that you think it's "very common" for men in general to behave this way and make casual and even strange threats to women to get them to comply with sex ("I'll kill your dog if you don't do what I want!"). But you have no issues with a legal and political climate in which women are enabled and even motivated to make frivolous accusations against men who simply may not have complied with their will because you think it's okay to just *assume* someone is guilty to ensure that the actual guilty people get punished... but only if those people happen to be men. That suggests a strong emotional bias towards men and an extreme level of favoritism towards women. This causes you to inadvertently make a strong case to everyone with objective reasoning that justice needs to be impartial.
Poor Emma. It’s a lot harder to swim in the deep end than wade in the shallow end, isn’t it?
No, midwit, you completely failed to understand my point, which is that I have a high enough opinion of women to expect them to exercise good judgement and avoid placing themselves in obviously dangerous situations.
No, sugar, I am 100% serious.
Your top comment amounted to "hey when women are mistreated sexually by shitheads, it's only natural that there will be a groundswell of accusations, some of which will yeah be life-ruining and some will be against innocent people, but them's the breaks when some men are shitheads"
I'm sick to fucking death of this bullshit idea, first mainstreamed by the sexual revolution, that people (women and men) can indulge every variety of promiscuity they can dream up and also are entitled to experience no consequences. It wasn't true then and it's not true now. It never has been which is why there have been socially imposed constraints on sexual behavior for a hundred thousand generations of humans. I know immature children who cannot control their appetites or accept responsibility (not entirely their fault because they were raised in a miasma of bullshit around this topic) think it's just Big Meanie Trying To Oppress Them but the truth is that sexual anarchy HURTS PEOPLE, including and maybe especially women. Women who are told by the culture that "hey man the problem is no one is TeAchIng boYs NOt to RaPE hurr durr go be seksually free and open and empowered just men should like totally be Good Men it's their fault" and then try to rely on the criminal justice system, which you correctly point out is not designed to respond appropriately when a date goes wrong, are so painfully fucking naive and it's hurting people.
So. We fix this like this. Women: Don't fuck men you don't know well enough to know whether you can trust them or not, and don't lie about it when you do. You could even be wild and crazy and go so far as to only have sex within a committed and exclusive relationship and only get into those with people of good character which you find out by getting to know that person over a period of time which we called in the olden days "dating" and was not generally marked by jumping in to bed the first time you met the person. This is an example of making good decisions for yourself, not bad ones, and not whining that Daddy down at the police precinct didn't fix everything when you trusted the wrong guy (and hot tip: a guy who fucks any woman who invites him into her bed is the wrong guy).
Yes, this is slut shaming, but I shame because I care. This has to stop. Other kinds of sexual misbehavior have other solutions but the 'hey I had this guy in my bed and he turned out to be an asshole!' is easy to fix. 95% of that goes away when women use the tools at their disposal to filter who has sexual access to them. This is not rocket science.
Due Process and the presumption of innocence are hallmarks of the justice system for good reason. While many of the #metoo stories were heart-wrenching, the Believe All Women mantra went down in flames after Tara Reade and other gold diggers started popping up.
I have two comments:
1. Duke lacrosse case
2. Hillary Clinton said all women should be believed (Except of course if they are accusing Bill.) I bet she regretted that as soon as it came out of her mouth.
Unfortunately, Hillary has no regrets.
And unless they are accusing Joe Biden, of course. The mainstream liberal #MeToo crowd was more than happy to demand due process consideration for men operating on their side of the political aisle, with one liberal female journalist going so far as to say that she believed Tara Reade's accusation but was going to support Biden anyway because he was a Democrat and thus better than any possible Republican. The hypocrisy and double standards of such people are off the scale, which is why we do not take them seriously when they claim their movement is all about justice and not about subjective entitlement or as a political tool to destroy men that they dislike. This is why #MeToo lost its credibility: it ceased to recognize nuance, subjectivity, its capability of being misused & weaponized, and the fact that hatred of men could cause it to get way of control.
And let's not forget the women who volunteered to service Clinton because he supported abortion rights. I call that bad taste but...........
The woke mindset can only see women as helpless victims of male predation or oppression, but never as duplicitous and very manipulative individuals who know exactly what they're doing to get what they want. Not all women are averse to sex with men to get ahead or thoroughly disgusted by the prospect of doing so.
So, it is utterly untrue that the only reason a woman would make such a transaction is if they were under extreme duress or desperation; this depends on the individual woman, and women in such industries as entertainment and politics are well aware of fellow women who do not mind the casting couch, so to speak. Some of them find this to be a useful tool in the ultra-competitive world of capitalism, and this can give them an unfair leg up over women with more demure sensibilities who would not sleep with a man to get an advantaged position in the industry. The women-centric #MeToo mentality does not recognize this as part of their worldview, however, which gives some women with the lack of aversion I described above the privilege (yes, that is the appropriate word) to trade sex for favors in certain industries and then accuse one or more of the men whom she made such a transaction with of foul play if the deal later goes sour for them -- like if they are later fired for reasons, justified or not, that have nothing to do with the men involved in the transaction. Then they blame the industry for being sexist, and fingerpoint the mean they made those transactions with as being examples of "male predatory behavior," with the implication that they only did what they had to do but were disgusted by having to do it, and only because the man manipulated them into doing it, or threatened them, or claiming they were "naive" and taken advantage of, etc. This is why all such cases and claims need to be verified with good evidence, because the woke mentality ignores female complicity in any type of situation and only focuses on the men. In actuality, female power has always been strong, and they can easily weaponize their sexuality and attractiveness for personal gain, much as men in positions of power can do with money.
For me it was the Kavanaugh accuser and the way the media supported her.
Right there is a glaring injustice in your comment. You don’t believe Tara Reade, maybe because her accusation was against someone on your side of the political bent, I don’t know the reason, regardless you paint her as a “gold digger”. You have no idea of the truth behind her story though, none of us do. It’s his word against hers.
I don't know if I believe Tara Reade or not because I have no idea what evidence there may have been. However, based on her willingness to irrationally destroy others without Due Process, I am betting that Emma is a Joe Biden supporter and was unwilling to believe Reade's allegations, thus showing her hypocrisy. You might notice that she completely dodged that question...
Hi, JAE. To be fair to both you and Charles's statements: for what it's worth, I personally think that Tara Reade has a better case than other accusers. I have seen examples of how little respect Biden has for the boundaries of girls and women on more than one instance of captured video, and this bit of evidence right there makes her accusation more credible. Obviously, many women are going to be telling the truth with their accusations, because men in power *do* all too often abuse that power. No argument there.
However, I think the point Charles may have been making is that women are also human and thus equally capable of abusing their power to destroy the lives of people they dislike -- whether it be for personal, political, or financial motivations -- *if* they find themselves in a position of either individual power or widespread socially conferred power due to their identity (either via immutable characteristics or choice of religion etc). This is what happened when the *MeToo movement became weaponized by liberals based on the pervasiveness of identity politics, in this case specifically the mainstream liberal iteration of it.
As a result, we find ourselves in a defensive position where we are hyper-aware of how many women in such a climate will take advantage of this, based not only on the number of frivolous accusations that have been proven but based on our knowledge of how human nature works, i.e., the inability of any group of people to handle disproportionate power well.
That said, I fully agree that such accusations need to be treated on a case-by-base basis, because there is a good chance that either the man or the woman in such cases might be lying. And, as Charles noted, the motivation of financial gain is, sadly, a very big form of motivation, which is why so many civil court lawyers are jumping on the #MeToo bandwagon.
I NEVER believed Tara Reade because ALL the evidence pointed to Reade being both a nut and a grifter, which she was!
‘Manipulative, deceitful, user’:
Tara Reade left a trail of aggrieved acquaintances
A number of those who crossed paths with Biden’s accuser say they remember two things: She spoke favorably about her time working for Biden, and she left them feeling duped.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/15/tara-reade-left-trail-of-aggrieved-acquaintances-260771
But the first clue was Reade's huge crush on Vladimir Putin. Seriously!
In her own words:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190404043945/https://medium.com/@shewrites94/why-a-liberal-democrat-supports-vladimir-putin-f54ca2a3a405
Because humans are human and there will always be someone trying to grift any movement.
Blacks being killed comes to mind among others.
"Blacks being killed...." lol.
So we should just destroy a man's life based on Believe All Women? Should Joe Biden be impeached and imprisoned based solely on Tara Reade's word?
Also, does a system of "justice" based on guilt by assumption because of your demographic less deserving of being put in quotes than one based on due process? Have mainstream liberals seriously come up with a better alternative than being required to weigh the evidence and investigate in an impartial manner to ensure that an innocent person is less likely of being indicted? The authoritarian and emotionalistic direction that liberalism has taken over the past few decades is truly disturbing to anyone with an objective respect for civil rights.
I’m thinking you may not be ready for the objective thought necessary to comprehend that people's lives should not be destroyed simply on the word of another. Yes, crimes often go unpunished, but that's no reason to break out the torches and pitchforks, or to make smug little comments such as yours...
On what planet does a rapist escape justice based solely on his claim of innocence. What criminal doesn't proclaim his innocence? That's simply not the way our system works. But it does require victim to be a complaining witness. Which is the least one would demand - unless you believe that innuendo and baseless allegations are all that should be needed for a conviction. Should I be able to say that Emma assaulted me without any evidence of injury or your whereabouts?
You dodged the question.
All most people are saying here is that due process is important. A single accusation with no proof should not condemn a person to punishment. That’s all.
And yet, at the same time, good and honorable men have been accused and shamed by venal, vengeful and deceitful women. If you think one gender has a monopoly on venality, I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale.
Ninety seven percent of violent crimes are committed by men; I'd say that's pretty damn close to a gender-based monopoly. And now some men (and the women who enable them) are trying to skew those stats by allowing violent offenders to choose their gender.
Here's a prime example from the NY TImes:
(Spoiler alert: "She" is actually a He who identified as a He while committing these murders!)
She Killed Two Women. At 83, She is Charged With Dismembering a Third.
Harvey Marcelin was charged with murder after a head was found in her Brooklyn apartment. Officials said it belonged to a dismembered body discovered in a shopping cart.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/nyregion/harvey-marcelin-shopping-cart-body.html?smid=url-share
He's talking about lying. There is no gender-based monopoly on lying.
97% of violent crimes may have been committed by men, but 97%+ of men haven't committed violent crimes.
Thank you for crediting me with a system that has evolved since Magna Carta and before. Sorry to say it's the best we have, and, if done judiciously, carefully and honestly, it usually leads to the correct result. You seem to be happier with a system based on rumor, innuendo and aspersions of guilt cast in the shadows?
People lie all the time and THAT'S why we have Due Process.
Does that include birthing "people?"
So do women; lie all the time, to get what they want.
By far the most cruelty I have ever endured is from jealous, insecure mean girls.
I would rather take a punch from a man - that physical pain ends in 30 seconds. With mean-girls, enduring the passive, aggressive whisper campaigns, of a bunch of jealous girls who want to socially and economically destroy the female who dare challenges them, is never-ending.
Human nature is really complicated and women have agency. Lots of agency.
Putting Louis CK and Harvey Weinstein in the same category of sexual predators demonstrates how you flattened all women into a single victim category, that is nicely tied up in a #metoo bow.
Just because you haven't figured out how to conceive of yourself as anything but a victim, doesn't mean the rest of us have to submit to your conception.
Men built civilization and now women are busy administering its decline.
Re the lumping of CK with Weinstein - you said it better than I was about to..
That is true. And it is why these things should be handled in a court of law with due process and evidentiary rules.
A man and a woman are in bed about to have sex...He says something horrible and she starts to leave, he says something else horrible and she stays, submits...She has been raped.
So if he'd just kept his mouth shut, she wouldn't have been raped, just screwed by an asshole, but because he said something she didn't like, she gets to condemn him as a rapist? Look, she's clearly an idiot, he's clearly an asshole. IMO, society should banish both of them, there is no benefit to having either around.
What if they had sex first, and then he said something horrible and she left, was she raped?
This is the most interesting and unusual - and apt - comment in this whole sorry chain today.
She could have left. She could have avoided having sex if she chose to. She submitted.
Clearly a woman who would otherwise have sex with a guy, but who hears something she doesn't like is not the same type of victim as a woman who is accosted in a parking lot and forcibly raped.
If someone told me I had the choice between being accosted in a parking lot and forcibly raped by some stranger and losing my dog, I may give a different answer if I were asked that instead of the former, I had to have sex with someone that I would have otherwise had sex with, except they said things I didn't like first.
What exactly is a "Neill", pray tell?
You think guys don't have sex with women that say things they don't want to hear? LOL.
Maybe I am awful, but at least I wouldn't entrap a person and accuse them of rape when it could have very easily been avoided.
Rape is a very serious crime, your comical exploitation of what a rape is demeans the people that have actually been raped. Grow up and stop hanging out with truly awful people.
Emma, I think the comprehension issue stems from not having enough information …
1) Was this a one night pickup, or did these 2 adults know each other beforehand?
2) Where did it take place? If in her home, was her dog present?
3) Etc.
Listen, I’m not discounting your obviously passionate presentation of a scenario where a woman submits to sex under threat, but to be fair to those questioning or discounting the charge of rape is legitimate without knowing more surrounding the circumstances.
Emma's argument against your reasonable requests, Honey, would likely be that because the man can say it was consensual whether it wasn't or not, because the woman could not prove this in a court of law we need to assume he was guilty to make sure he doesn't get away with it. Her rationale against due process is that men are "often" like this, and the law and society needs to consider that men need special restrictions and women special protections (read: entitlements coupled with a condescending lack of agency). She says that men "often" bully women into giving them sex, yet the truly Orwellian degree of checkpoints mainstream liberals like her impose to make it all but impossible for a man to be in a position where the consent of a woman he had sex with to be either legally or socially recognized is one of the most severe forms of overt bullying one can ever see.
It's a form of pre-emptive bullying to stop someone whom you presume must be a bully just because of the demographic they belong to. She loathes men so she always wants them in a position where they can be destroyed, and to regulate the sex lives of men and women for the alleged benefit of the latter. This, of course, will create a situation where a third party can accuse a man of coercion or bullying to receive sex even if the woman he was with does not agree.
"It's a form of pre-emptive bullying"
That's the conclusion I came to as well after thinking more about it, yesterday.
Rape is so common in your eyes because you consider so many normal and common interactions to be rape or coercion. You can make any type of crime seem "common" if you conveniently broaden the definition of it widely enough.
The fact that you think cajoling is a rape is why you believe that rape is so common. The fact that you think seduction is rape may also be why you believe there are so many rapes.
People like you do a grave disservice to people trying to affect change for women (and men) when dealing with power struggles in the workplace and elsewhere.
Doesn’t matter what I, or you “think” Totally matters in Court
She revoked and then consented again. IMO. This is what is known as a question of fact to be determined by the chosen trier of fact - i.e. a judge or a jury. All of the rest of us are just offering our opinion on the facts presented. I think you are saying she complied after the dog statement out of fear. But that fear must be reasonable. I do not think it is as presented. And I love dogs BTW.
You.
I'm not saying this couldn't happen, but there is always a temptation to come up with unlikely possibilities and then make them central examples that drive policies and mores that mostly don't make a lot of sense.
"... there is always a temptation to come up with unlikely possibilities and then make them central examples that drive policies and mores that mostly don't make a lot of sense."
Agreed and well stated. That would be like Emma's chosen example of a man threatening to kill a woman's dog unless she has sex with him, and then saying that it's "very common" for men to do such things, with the implications that it's equally common for women to be so wussy that they actually comply with the threat instead of taking action against it. This is the essence of the Victim ideology: it not only demonizes men but it infantalizes women in a condescending way. When you use such unlikely examples and then call them likely, you're just begging for rational and objective people to come out in defense of a suspect that prefers to investigate such claims rather than just assuming they're true to make sure the guy goes to jail just in case he is guilty.
The woman gets to decide whether or not this was rape.
Rape is a strong word, and should be.
She would learn more from the incident if she saw that she needed to make some changes in her life, like getting to know someone better before having sex, like loving herself more. If she recognized that she had a part in what happened, then her life improves. Not, not, not that she was to blame, but that her choices played a part. I say this from experience, having come of age in the '70s.
Rape victims of war, that's a different matter, for example.
I think you do not understand what consent means.
Goading? Are you serious, being annoying will get you laid - do the women just do it to shut the men up?
Cajoling? Saying flattering things is now a cause of non-consensual sex? LOL.
Look, again, you make a mockery of a very serious crime.
What you are trying to do here, Emma, is criminalize or demonize common forms of persuasion utilized by both genders to acquire sex from someone they are attracted to. And it's all based on demanding that men jump through a series of hoops before a woman can say yes, but putting women in the position of being forced to hold up those hoops or be labeled a victim.
You say "most" men have done this? You put so many caveats on the road to acquiring consent that meets your very stringent standards on this that you ignore the fact that many women have "goaded" and "cajoled" men they are interested in the same way, but you only consider it an issue if men do it. This is because you want almost any woman to be in a position where she can easily get a man who displeases her in any way accused since he failed to mark one of the hundred boxes of criteria you expected him to check off in order for it to be considered proper "consent." And you pretend to see no way this can be weaponized or based on a truly negative opinion of men in general?
Then you find it strange that you're getting such a backlash from anyone who has control of their emotions and do not hate men.
You posit an absurdly-contrived situation, declare it to be "incredibly common" and then imply that the entire framework of the criminal justice be retooled as if this were the norm rather than the vanishingly-rare exception, without acknowledging the obvious side effects that would have.
And I see from some of your other comments that you're basically expanding the definition of rape to include any situation in which a woman objectively consents to sex but on some level would rather not do it. I've had sex in situations where I would have preferred not to. Like, I was tired from a long day and really just wanted to go to sleep, but she wanted to so I did it anyway because you do things like this in relationship. I never felt remotely raped.
And perhaps more directly analogous to your examples, I have had sex with women under emotional coercion. Someone I was trying to disengage from, who understood that I was trying to disengage from her, and who telegraphed the intense pain that that would cause her. I didn't want to inflict that pain on someone I cared for, so kept postponing the inevitable. (And as I'm sure you know, this is a very common relationship tactic that both men and women use).
But this wasn't rape. Rather, it was a failure on my part to maintain proper boundaries. Most of the situations that you describe in your comments are failures to maintain boundaries, and it's very counterproductive to conflate them with rape, and not just because of the obvious damage that it does to the non-rapist man. If you actually want to help women in these situations, it's much more fruitful to teach them how to maintain proper boundaries than it is to exonerate them from all responsibility and thus agency. Particularly since if she has difficulty maintaining proper sexual boundaries, she's also probably being walked over in other aspects of her life as well. And of course it also wouldn't hurt to explain to her that it's probably not a great idea to bring home the type of man who's going to threaten her if for whatever reason she decides to back out of having sex.
Well put.
Professional.experience? If so you have lost your objectivity. Personal experience? Is so it is consuming you. Both? If so, both. It is not that your position(s) lack merit. It is that you make emotional arguments. Profane emotional arguments. Rarely are those effective.
Alleged victims.
Your sort of "Metoo" happened because a bunch of hysterics apparently prefer a system of "justice" more akin to Salem circa 1691 than a system based on facts and provable allegations.
Just wanted to say, Bruce, that in following this thread and the impressive back and forth you're having with Emma (from both of you), it appears your Sunday was a helluva a lot more exciting than mine..
Emma was a good sport. I think she took more fire than necessary.
Oddly after our dialogue I saw that some Hollywood dork was successfully sued for millions by an aspiring young woman he lured back to his room. So even without a criminal case there may be the very justice for true victims that Emma seeks.
Metoo happened because people act like because you can’t prove something happened beyond a reasonable doubt means it didn’t happen.
*****
No. It means the criminal justice system cannot act on whatever happened.
You seem to have a stilted view of our justice system. It is the result of thousands of years of refinement. People had wives daughters and sisters that they wanted protected. They also wanted to make sure that the innocent were not found guilty. You seem like you are letting the perfect (as you see it) be the enemy of the good. Work to refine our system not condemn it because it isn’t perfect in your eyes.
Please, no condescending attacks against those who question you. It takes away your credibility. Common Sense / Bari invite us to a place where we can agree to question and agree to disagree. Be civil & respectful!
"I’m not saying it’s a bad standard, I’m saying that it leaves most victims of rape without recourse to justice, and that makes them angry, which is also totally fucking natural."
And your repetitive inability to suggest an alternative suggests that I may not be the only pile of bricks here. Moreover the notion that "most victims of rape are without recourse to justice" is completely unsupported. I suspect that's because your definition of "rape" has little to do with the actual crime of rape.
Unless you were there and had ful context and perspective, or unless you are God, you don't know whether a crime has been committed, let alone if it was a particular man.
What is the "impossible standard of evidence" to which you are referring? The law doesn't say what evidence is required. It merely establishes that the evidence be reasonable and necessary to prove guilt. What standard would you impose?
> Likewise you don’t know that a woman is lying;
Indeed. Thats why I used the word "alleged" instead of "fraudulent" for example.
> insisting on an impossible standard of evidence for most instances of rape to meet,
The fact that people get convicted for raoe and related crimes falsifies your claim.
Perhaps a different tack: wht would your perfect trial look like?
I don't agree with this example, Emma, especially not as an argument that due process can be a bad thing. You gave a scenario where a woman was very clearly coerced, which is extortion, and thus a form of rape, and hence should be punished by law. You also mention, understandably, that this may amount to a "his word against hers" sort of scenario that cannot be easily proven. But that in no way justifies the erasure of due process and the replacement of it with mob "justice," because when you throw that very important aspect of American jurisprudence out the window, you create a scenario where it becomes increasingly common for angry and bitter women who were not actually raped to lie based on a rejection, resentment because they didn't get everything they wanted out of a relationship or interaction, financial motivations, or simply on the basis of mental illness. Empowering a group of people to do such things with reckless abandon is not justice by any sane definition of the word.
Also, saying that such a scenario as you described is "incredibly common"? I disagree, and I think that is a hyperbolic assumption based on an implicit hatred of all men on the basis of what some have done. Admittedly, more men will do such things in an environment where they are in positions of entitlement. However, that is true of *all* human beings, and you do not rectify that by simply inverting the entitlement factor and arguing that it's okay to destroy people's lives because you think people from that group will destroy the lives of those from another group. That's a classic example of allowing Peter to slit Paul's throat so that Paul won't do it first.
Finally, I disagree that there is "no hope" of finding justice in such situations. Very, very few men (or anyone else) who engage in such predatory behavior do it just once, and never again. They establish observable patterns of behavior, and these can build up and be used against them as damning character evidence. Of course, multiple accusers do not always suggest guilt, as there can be other factors that motivate at least some of those multiple accusations, including monetary motives and satisfying a need for attention that people with certain emotional problems have, which is why such accusations need to be investigated thoroughly and why realistic amounts of evidence must be there.
This process will not always be perfect, but we can mitigate it by making certain that no group of people (whether men, women, or otherwise) have a disproportionately strong ability to hurt or coerce others.
But of course #MeToo is far, far more than a "cry of rage." It's a demand for very serious real world consequences based solely on a woman's say-so. Assume that there'd never been a Depp/Heard trial, but only Depp's allegations of abuse by Heard. What, according to you, should have been her punishment? Prison? Monetary damages? Loss of a job and job opportunities? All of the above? None? Those are things #MeToo demand men suffer solely due to the accusations of women, and many of them often do. Not exactly just a "cry of rage."
Do you disagree that "s a demand for very serious real world consequences based solely on a woman's say-so. "?
Stated another way, given the opportunity, you chose to not answer the question.
Amber Heard is a very, very prominent example of something that has become all too widespread thanks to the weaponizing of #MeToo by liberals. It was created by liberals during an era when they have gone off the rails with authoritarianism, and that alone renders its motivations suspect from the get-go. Especially when some of its main architects took a very hypocritical stance on it once a man they supported (Joe Biden) was accused. Then the calls for due process came out. Not because they necessarily thought Biden was innocent, but because he was a Democrat. This is how identity politics and political exceptionalism works in terms of actual justice. It's all about who you are and what you identify with, not whether your accusation actually has merit in its own right.
In your scenario she submitted. Women can't, and shouldn't, have it both ways. One is either strong enough to do the right thing (say no AND protect their dog) or women are a weaker sex in need of protection, in which case the notion of equality is a myth. Sheluyeng is right about due process. I am weary of starlets who engaged in sex to further their careers and then crying victim 10, 20, 30 years later. Personally I think it is wrong to engage in sex as a career move period, but failing to complain timely ultimately denies due process.
Welcome to the "moderate, non-echo chamber, interested in debate, disaffected, formal liberal" board, Emma. You will NOT be popular here. Have fun!
But is that not true of you as well? You seem impervious to any other POV.
That does not even make sense. If a guy says I will kill you if you don't have sex with me, that is a threat. And the use thereof constitutes rape. If he says I will kill your child or your family then to be reasonable he would have to have the ability to carry it out to be reasonable. With the ability to carry it out that is likely rape. The reasonableness of I will kill your dog as a threat is a question of fact to be determined by a finder of fact - a judge or a jury. If he harmed the dog before the act it would be a stronger case but even then.the fear would still be of harm to yourself - if he harmed my dog, what will he do to me? In other words there is a perceived threat without it being uttered. Maybe the same Argument could be made just on the basis of the threat to harm the dog but my instinct is that a successful prosecution would need more information (he had a weapon, he grabbed the dog). But who let's a whackadoodle like this in their home with their (presumably) small, fragile pets?
This is a classic example of projection.
I did try to understand your POV: which seems to be that since it's difficult, in your eyes, to use actual evidence to find out if an accusation is likely to be true, that means women often cannot find justice for real crimes against them. So, what is your solution? Eliminate due process and always assume that a woman is telling the truth in the total absence of any evidence "just in case"? I'm sorry, Emma, but your stated believe that men are very frequently doing things like this reveals your bias against men, which is why you want a system to justice to favor one gender over the other.
The same is of course true of all sorts of things, not just men and women, and not just about sexual matters. Two people are talking about a business deal, one of them backs out, the other reveals his Mafia connections and threatens to kill the first one's dog, the first one relents and does the business deal. It's unjust, it's hard to prove, things like this have happened many times.
We don't suspend the rules of due process for this example either.
Even accepting all the ugliness of the many unsolved crimes in our society, most of which are not rape, the presumption of innocence, due process, and the rule of law are still far better than the alternative.
I concur, John. Emma's POV, however, is based on the assumption that men are so disproportionately awful and capable of crimes against women than the reverse that the justice system needs to be skewed in favor of a woman's word even in the absence of substantive evidence, because otherwise a lot of guilty men will go free.
That may be (maybe she says it somewhere in the other comments). It's a common point of view. This is a strategy for people trying to undo the foundations of liberal democracy: life isn't fair for my group so let's burn down the whole system. Even if those propositions were true, it still wouldn't be much of an argument (what's the alternative?).
Of course, these propositions are not true, and the reality is that all sorts of people bear injustice and that women are not special, nor is whatever other minority group someone might use as an example.
Agreed. She makes her attitude towards men quite clear throughout her posts by pointing out extreme scenarios, which started with a man coercing a woman to have sex with him by threatening to kill her dog if she doesn't comply -- and then saying that this is "very common." Yes, I'm not making that up. The rest of her posts contain classic SJW tropes and terms.
Her point, like all SJWs (of either gender and all gender identities) seems to be, "let's modify the system so it has a clear bias in favor of women over men, because men are much more awful than women, and because of that, he is so likely to have been guilty of the accusation she made against him that we need to always believe her just to make sure that he goes to jail if he's guilty, otherwise she fail to find justice."
And she doesn't like the fact that due process requires evidence rather than assumptions of guilt based on gender or similar arbitrary biases, since she feels it's a given that men are terrible and that women are very unlikely to lie. Of course, the likelihood of someone from any demographic lying increases in direct proportion to how much favoritism both the law and the general public gives to them for that arbitrary, sentimental reason. People in general lie all the time, and we can't give them further impetus to do so with arbitrary forms of leniency and favoritism. That's not seeking justice and fairness, it's seeking privilege and exceptional power. She also wants the caveats of consent to be so rigid that it's easy for a woman to retroactively take away consent if in retrospect she comes to the conclusion (possibly convinced by others) that she was somehow coerced into it and didn't make actually make the choice under her own volition. It's not hard to see how many cans of worms that opens up.
It can also be used against women by denying them agency if a third party decides to intervene for personal reasons or if that third person has an agenda against a certain man and woman making a connection.
And what is her suggested alternative to due process? All SJWs tend to be pretty vague on that for obvious reasons. They make it clear by implication what the alternative should be, which is why they simply tear down the existing system. Autocratic thinkers do not like due process for good reason.
Interesting, but wrong. Personal Responsibility for choices can not be avoided.
I think what Josh actually meant was that people of both genders need to own their decisions from an ethical standpoint. That is in no way saying that women who are actually raped because of a bad choice means that the man should not be legally accountable. But if a woman has consensual sex with a man, and then later decides that she regrets it for a variety of factors, she can't just decide that it wasn't consensual retroactively. That's why it's important to investigate and figure out what actually happened rather than always taking the word of the accuser because they're part of a protected class of people, or because due process makes it difficult for a simple accusation to indict someone (of a non-protected class).
Well you've messed up your analogy.
The woman who's been sexually assaulted and can't get the assaulter prosecuted would be more analogous to a situation where a man is falsely accused and can't get the accuser prosecuted for filing a false report. In the direct analogy, he's not in jail, but he has been wronged by a liar and may suffer some severe consequences in the social realm, which are compounded by his inability to get justice.
And if we change the analogy to this more fair comparison, then I'd agree with your conclusion. It sucks to be the falsely accused person, but there is an element of personal responsibility in having picked a bad partner. And even to the extent that the situation was unavoidable, I don't know what solution the legal system can offer.
There is no need, however, to forestall feeling sorry for people because bad things happen to them. I feel sorry for a lot of people who can't get justice through the legal system.
Men and women should be able to complete on exactly the same field, the same pool, the same court, etc. Eliminate men-only sports leagues and women-only sports leagues. Let the athletes, regardless of sexist or gender compete on the same physical field and event. The strongest, fastest, most athletic should compete against the strongest, fastest, most athletic and those that aren’t good enough to compete against them on the same level can have their own league. Oh shit wait.
Unfettered free market/no regulations solves everything!
Yup, no doubt. Just no evidence to support that, and plenty against it.
I have no problem with women competing in predominantly men's sports if they can prove they have the same strength capabilities. That would be only a small number, however. Of course, sports like football are different from the fighting sports. A woman in a physical sport like football would need to be able to take hits as well as run fast, or she could be in serious trouble. And the majority of women are too light to deal with blows from men who typically weigh in excess of 200 pounds.
Sometimes it's not about sheer skill, but strength. If everything else is equal, then strength matters. Personally, having experience in martial arts, I wouldn't mind women competing against men, because despite the fact that men are typically stronger in the upper body, and thus hit harder, women are typically faster and have more stamina than men, and this balances things out.
A featherweight boxer would be faster than a heavyweight, and may be able to land more punches, but the heavyweight will typically hit harder and inflict more damage, and could also take more blows. This could even out depending on the fighters, but the rule system in a competitive fighting sport tends to place a preference on fighters who are as close to equal in strength and therefore potential hitting power as possible.
I might go see it just because I love classical music.
Other than that, 0% of the storyline sounds enticing to me.
Hey, if they play Bach's unaccompanied cello suites or Vivaldi's Four Seasons, I'm in! :-)
Funny - that was almost my exact reaction.
The writer starts off with "Tar is unsettling, pretentious and too long. Go see it immediately."
Then begins to outline the movie with every reason you shouldn't see it. I literally did an eye roll at the "BIPOC pangender" student line.
I'll continue to wait for movies that are #PostWoke.
BIPOC pan gender- they put everything in one poor victim. Sounds like a great movie from the outset. Although I love Cate Blanchett and classical music this is going to be a no from me.
Or until it comes out streaming for free.
Aren't we bored yet with movies (and cultural influences) that ask us to agonize over someone else's guilt. I'd like to see a movie that asks us to agonize over whether judgment is really ours to mete out, and if so whether it's a satisfying use of energy.
I just revisited Minority Report yesterday- helluva action movie, and gives you a decent amount of intellectual meat to chew on.
That’s actually a great idea
If the answer is negative Twitter must then evaporate.
It’s interesting to me that this story of Cancel Culture and I’m assuming (otherwise is there really a movie?) a grey area of exploitation is nested in the world of Classical Music, that most elite of artistic communities. I haven’t seen the movie-it appeals to me on zero levels. But I wonder if the many facets and potential redeeming features (genius, a hinted at mental disorder) would be treated with again an assumed-(again apologies)-ambiguity if this tale had been set in the less elite world of say, Monster Truck racing.
elite worlds involve elite minds.
intelligence and intellectual sofistication breed more emotional complexity.
That is the point.
Monster Truck settings , whatever that is btw, doubtfully would be a ground for posing questions on human behavior juxtapositions shown in the movie ...
‘elite worlds involve elite minds.
intelligence and intellectual sofistication breed more emotional complexity.’
Genuinely find this comment breathtaking Leah. It harks back to the idea of regular people deferring to their ‘betters’. That regular, ‘uneducated’ people are incapable of experiencing a full range of emotions.
It seems where we stand politically these days can be simplified thus. Are regular people-the masses- actually beasts? Beast who, without the intervention of their intellectual and moral superiors, would descend into a cesspool of racism and violence? Or are regular people quite capable of making their own choices, and voting in their own best interests, even if they, like me, are philistine enough to value video games over opera?
Elite minds are the minds that have got us into the worst recession in memory, a massive crime wave, and a tanking economy. Maybe they are not quite as elite minded as they tell themselves.
Excellent post could not agree more!
Thank you
Love Your take on the comment.
Our perceptions come from our Own Stories.
None of the above was implied. Not even close.
And yes, you are correct, leadership breeds errors bc it's a human action., Assuming we leave personal corruption aside for a sec, those who dare to lead are definitely more courageous than the complacent ones.
Thanks for replying Leah.
Perhaps. Sometimes leadership takes courage. Sometimes what masquerades as leadership is merely about becoming the mouthpiece for orthodoxy and group think that only serves the status quo and vested interests.
But your original comment was, and forgive me if I have misunderstood, that elite minds are somehow more complex intellectually and/or emotionally than non elites. I reject that idea wholeheartedly.
Neurosis, Sir. Neurosis and anxiety often accompany that intellectual sophistication.
no one speaks of decisions and abilities of "unwashed masses ".
I proudly consider myself one of those..
{smile}
and nowadays i leave politics aside as much as i can ... Being in danger of being canceled LOL
I think you were referring to specific elitism - in the arena of artistic expression for example- and DE is referring to the concept of an individual being an "elite" in general and thus superior to the masses. I recognize elite athletes, elite scholars, elite musicians. I do not recognize any person as being a life-long member of an "elite" ruling class destined to make decisions for me or my fellow citizens. I find that unAmerican.
Agree!
Bravo.
^^ A perfect example of the fact that you can’t tell if comments online are authentic or self-parody.
Curious,humanly - why?
It’s because most people reading that will know that there is no such thing as ‘elite minds’ that possess ‘more emotional complexity’. They will take your comment as sarcasm.
Elite world? Movies are an elite world. Reality is more prosaic.
My daughter started violin as a child and now has a masters in violin performance, so I’ve logged a lot of hours as a bystander in the classical music world - at her lessons, auditions, concerts, music festivals.
Not to disparage anyone but based on my experience classical musicians are as likely to attend a monster truck rally as anyone else.
There's a great movie waiting to be made about now-deceased NASCAR driver Tim Richmond. Hollywood today doesn't have the ability to make that movie.
(ESPN did do a 30 For 30 episode about him.)
Maybe the credits are in the front to allow you to leave early.
Another social question. Did she or didn't she. In reality it's if those deep thinking lazy news people think you are with their human destroying causes or not. They will judge, jury, and destroy you. It's not about truth and justice. Look from Me Too, ANTIFA, BLM, or any of the other so called rights movement.
This might have been an interesting story 8 years ago. Today it just reminds you of how screwed up our society has become.
Maybe that was the point.
#MeToo has always been a difficult one for me to wrap my head around.
I suppose that's because I modeled in my late teens and early 20s and so was exposed to a lot of casting couch culture.
The barriers to entry to "glamour" jobs are _quite_ high, and I suppose—as I saw it then—colliding with the occasional obnoxious male was the vig you had to pay to play that game.
I don't know how I would see it now. But I _will_ say back then that I saw almost as many women manipulating their sexual availability to get ahead as I saw men taking advantage of reluctant women.
Back to "Tár "—so it's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" only with Mahler instead of Spanish nationalists? 😀
Ah, yes, it really does take two to tango, doesn't it? In this modern time, when women By God Control Their Bodies, the exchange of sex for advancement seems perfectly transactional, a bargain freely entered into, with both parties knowing the risk and rewards, and decided by both to be beneficial.
So long as it's transactional.
I would say with predators like Weinstein, clearly it was not.
Well then, in the absence of forcible rape, it was incumbent upon the young ladies to keep their pants on and advance their careers on talent alone, wouldn't you say?
They either consented or they didn't, and if they did, it was in exchange for something of value. That's the definition of a free transaction - a transaction of a type with a long and storied career in the annals of men and women.
Personally, I don't disagree with you.
That's why I said #MeToo was a difficult one for me to wrap my head around.
Weinstein was a predator.
But was he a criminal? Or simply a sacrificial lamb?
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
Personally, I think he was a criminal.
To the extent that other men got away with the same behaviors, he was also a scapegoat. But laws are almost always applied discriminatorily, no? And that discretion, more often than not, doesn't originate with the victims; it originates with the prosecutors.
There are a lot of parallels here between Weinstein and Andrew Cuomo. Both were widely detested and had reputations for being enormous bullies. But Cuomo was a terrifically good administrator, and Weinstein produced indie films that—gasp!—made actual money.
I couldn't tell you when the perceptions shifted. With Cuomo, I suspect he wasn't needed once the Democrats got Biden into the White House. With Weinstein, I don't know.
Personally, I don't think many of the accusations against Cuomo rise to the level of sexual harassment. But he was very unpopular, and this was a convenient way of bringing him down.
Same thing with Weinstein—except that what he did went _well_ beyond the level of harassment into very brutal sexual predation. But I have to think that people knew about his behavior for years, so it's the timing here that's really interesting.
I think that Weinstein was a pig and a predator but I wish someone could give me one solid example of a crime he committed. Does whining and begging for sex and promising great rewards amount to a crime? Or a business transaction? The guy was too fat and out of shape to actually chase, let alone catch, any of these attractive young women. I'm open to hear other takes but it looks like another show trial in our demented age of wokeness and Soviet-style denunciatory "justice."
Cuomo was also a pig but even less of a criminal. His trial should have been by the voters of New York. And I say this as someone with a deep dislike of Andrew Cuomo and his corruption of politics and government in New York.
Whether you agree or not, proffering quid pro quo in a professional setting is, in many instances, criminal.
Sexual harassment is a crime, no? What you describe is classic sexual harassment
No doubt in my mind at all that many of the rape accusations against Weinstein were just that—rape.
The coercion in this instance wasn't just physical force. It was also professional ruin.
Sacrifical wolf, more like.
He just played dirtier and meaner than some of the others. And he had more objective power in the business, which made him more dangerous.
Physically raping the women? Maybe but somehow I doubt that fat Harvey had that in him.
One of the things the movie captured very well is the assistant (Franchesca) and the new cellist (Olga) not looking like victims at all. The Krista character's situation is more ambiguous (it might take some rewatching for me to figure out what the movie was even trying to say about her).
Or you could just watch a week’s worth of "Lauren Lake's Paternity Court" to decide #BelieveAllWomen or #BelieveAllMen is a farce. The DNA doesn't lie; many people do.
Why I’ll see this movie:
1. Cate Blanchett
2. A scene where a professor reams a “BIPOC pangender student” for refusing to play Bach? I’ll all in.
3. CATE. BLANCHETT.
Except Freddie seems to disapprove of this reaming. I’d be popping popcorn and rewatching it multiple times.
DOUBT is another excellent movie about this subject. But it was pre Me Too.
Excellent movie
Emma is there something you trying to tell us?
And as I recall the boy’s mother knew and gave it her tacit approval because she felt it was a cost worth paying for the doors the priest could open for the boy.
Well, here's yet ANOTHER Hollywood movie that I'll NEVER see in my lifetime. I'm sure it will get an Academy Award nomination but I'll never know. Who watches the Academy Awards anymore... especially with Jimmy Kimmel hosting it again this year? Yawn... so, on to something more interesting and exciting... "Honey, have we taken the dogs out to relieve themselves yet?"...
Sounds to me more like a glimpse into the death throes of a society that's gone soft with excess and mad with far too much time on its hands and little purposeful things with which to fill it. As someone else cogently observed, without the beauty of classical music contained in the film, there's little else to recommend it.
The movies have become either rehashes of other movies or comic book stuff. Rarely is there anything new because it appears Hollywood has run out of ideas. And you’re right, our society is in its death throes. We allow any number of outright public perversions to occur to our children while at the same time not requiring our children to excel.
We are entering a dark night i believe. People will be freezing this winter and I just don’t care. This is what the people want, they’ll get it good and hard. For the planet, of course.
while grateful for the film review, yes i have seen the movie and liked it immensely, I would disagree with the judgment on the film's aim.
I saw in it as painful story of injustice handled through a new/old "if- you-are-not-with- us-you-are-against-us" social behavior complacency requirement.
Dismissive of our precious individuality (especially for the gifted of us) and deep personal complexity associated with brilliance, the proper inquiry process tosses that proverbial child "with the water".
The aim of the so-called "cancel culture " is exactly that - distraction .
Distraction without any creation in place.
Existence vs Living.
How tragic...
“Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” "At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first,...."
I'd be willing to bet that every established religion has a similar story. This story is compelling since one man stood against a mob and reminded them of their hypocrisy. "...the older ones first..." - the older you get the more you understand this.
And what was He Writing in the sand?
Exactly! In reality we all know, because he writes about us all in the sand.
"Dismissive of our precious individuality (especially for the gifted of us) and deep personal complexity associated with brilliance, the proper inquiry process tosses that proverbial child with the water'".
Did you mean to include yourself among "the gifted." And what makes one "gifted" or just "ordinary." Is an "ordinary" electrician who brilliantly diagnoses your circuits and restores power to your home not "gifted?" Should he not be honored for his "deep personal complexity?" If not, why not?
The slippery slope of elitist self reverence perhaps?
“Dismissive of our precious individuality (especially for the gifted of us) and deep personal complexity associated with brilliance,…”
This reads to me like justification for self-centeredness and narcissism. Like elites are so wrapped up in themselves and their perceived “brilliance” that they just can’t even.
I think Leah Kip's comment was meant to say we're always happy to dump on value creators - an activity that in itself delivers no value and is consequently self destructive and without substance.
thank you.
some of us are not longer interested in public bashing...
really.
it's has proven to be painful and pointless
Agree
That is circuitous. Who gets to say who is a "value creator"? The creator who puts it in the public stream or those who dump on the creator once the creator makes it available? Should the creator get a trophy for merely trying even if the observers of the content don't find value in it? BTW this is nothing new. It is why we have masterpieces made public long after the creator thereof has died.
Thanks, your comment came up right as I was posting mine.
Can't even perceive that there is another POV, much less many.
see my reply to Bruce.
Your take is indeed amusing.
no disrespect. just an observation
Not to worry. I am happy to observe people myself for who they actually are.
Agree. Crabs in a bucket. Harrison Bergeron. “People throw rocks at things that shine.”
Nice to see you on here, Freddie!
Tchaikovsky suffered from “auditory hallucinations” as a child. The music wouldn’t let him sleep. Maybe it’s a device to show her musical bonifides, without announcing it, for those who know the story.
I actually found the auditory hallucinations intriguing as well.
I'll put it on the "to do" list for the music and Blanchett's performance. I like movies that don't preach.