All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!(Part II)

[Iron Maiden]

I'm unaware of Democrats doing any vetting of the allegations. It certainly didn't take them a month.

Dr. Ford was eventually dragged to the public, so the main difference with doing it earlier would have been that there would be more time to investigate what happened prior to the scheduled vote.

I'm not sure that leaking the information earlier was the only option Kavanaugh's opponents had. It does appear that the people talking with Dr. Ford were not doing a good job of communicating her options, such as the Judiciary Commitee's offer to go to California to meet with her. There were procedures through which allegations could be taken to the investigators.

As for how an innocent man should react, it seems overly optimistic to believe that an investigation would disprove an allegation of wrongdoing by someone in your social circle decades earlier, who say she didn't talk about the incident again for decades, doesn't remember where or when it occurred, and has no contemporaneous evidence of it. Proving innocence beyond a reasonable doubt is very difficult, which is why we don't insist upon this standard in legal proceedings.

With the gang bang allegations, Avenatti said he has witnesses, so it's up to him to produce them. The specific allegations involve multiple direct witnesses, so reporters would also know what to look for. It is more outlandish than a woman getting raped at a party, because the allegation involves multiple perpetrators (including accomplices with direct knowledge) and multiple incidents.

Outlandish, huh? I did find this archived article from 1988 from the NYT: The Reality of Crime on Campus


The article goes into incidents of murder, racial brawls, but there are other incidents of campus crimes mentioned:

• A man on a university campus walks up to a woman he has never met and bites her breast in a collegiate fad known as ''sharking.''
• Four university football players in California gang-rape a woman.

Another quote of interest:

"Several well-publicized crimes, a growing number of negligence lawsuits against colleges accused of lax security and a greater awareness of ''date rape,'' gang rape and other crimes against women have forced schools to confront the problem in an unprecedented way."

and further:

Mr. Keller and other experts say many crimes, regardless of where they happen, go unreported, but in the closed environment of the college campus crimes of a sexual nature are under-reported. Victim and attacker often move in the same social circles, and there is a great disincentive to go to the police and press charges.

But officials at Towson State University in Maryland who have conducted surveys of crime on 1,100 campuses for the last two years, say they do detect a rise in violence.

''What we've been finding is there has been some increase in acts of violence, physical and sexual assault, rape and major vandalism in the last year,'' said Jan Sherrill, the school's assistant vice president of student affairs. ''What we don't know, because this is all self-reported, is just how extensive it is. What we do know is that most of the facts that are given to us are considered by the people who are reporting them to us to be lower than what's actually happening.''

This is pretty much the environment on campuses in the 1980s

[Tazirai]

[Raiders]

Kavanaugh should have been disqualified when he talked about the Clintons and 2016 election.
He shown he is too partisan to be a SC justice.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Kavanaugh should have been disqualified when he talked about the Clintons and 2016 election.
He shown he is too partisan to be a SC justice.

It’s a dangerous level of bias Republicans are purposely ignoring because they’re hellbent on rushing Kavanaugh through before midterms.

[Iron Maiden]

That was a big reveal to me also when he said that this was some kind of Vengeance for the Clintons movement. How can you have someone this obviously biased as this on the Supreme Court?

[Carabas]

It’s a dangerous level of bias Republicans are purposely ignoring because they’re hellbent on rushing Kavanaugh through before midterms.

Of course, they're not ignoring it. His bias is why he got nominated in the first place.

[Mister Mets]

She says she cannot possibly be mistaken about this. That is the point that went right over your head (possibly because you want it to).

She can be mistaken on that without being a liar.

I also think that for the public, this whole Kavanaugh thing is just a symbol for something bigger. Over the last week, two friends of mine, both Liberal Democrats, have launched into the "Suppose for the sake of argument..." speech. You know the speech. "He was 17. He was bombed. He got forceful which is horrible but there was no rape and he wasn't thinking straight."

But the evidence seems more and more that with Kavanaugh, this wasn't a false accusation, an inaccurate memory or some one-time horrible incident that thankfully did not go to the point of an actual rape. Contrary to his claims, this was a pattern of behavior.

But I think the reason even very liberal men sometimes launch into this speech is that the Republicans have done a great job of feeding on paranoia and convincing people that, somehow, false accusations are going to be everywhere and the accusation alone will equal guilt, at least in the court of public opinion and it doesn't help that there are people for whom the accusation equals guilt. Ironically, false accusations tend to be a pattern too. So you end up with evidence there too. But, contrary to popular myth, false accusations are rare.

The statistics on false accusations are murky, since a lot of it's based on things that are proven to be untrue. We're never going to know statistics about false allegations that are not settled.

Prominent people are more likely to face false allegations, just because more people are aware of them. It is worth noting that there has been one demonstrably false allegation against Kavanaugh, since the person who told the Rhode Island story has recanted.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...nt/1476218002/

If we don't want to be in a situation in which an accusation alone equals guilt, we shouldn't encourage a vote against Kavanaugh on the basis of one uncorroborated allegation.

The most ridiculous aspect of this entire selection process is that there is absolutely no way that it can be argued that there aren't better choices for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

Choose one and move on.

There are two points on this.

First, Kavanaugh does generally have an impressive record, and was the most qualified of the people on Trump's list. An early knock against him from a strategic point was that it meant there was more of a paper trail to find something that could be used against him. Amy Coney Barret and Amul Thapar joined the Appeals court about an year ago. Raymond Kethledge and Thomas Hardiman haven't been as influential as Kavanaugh.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.87f4665c32db

Second, if the party were to dump him over this, it would set a precedent that a single uncorroborated allegation released at the last minute is enough to derail a nomination.

Some people are very ready to have this discussion, and think it would be a good idea. If this is what you want, it should be clearly and unambiguously articulated.

But there are potential dangers to making it clear that as long as one person who was ever in someone's social circle is willing to commit perjury, that'll be enough to keep someone from a major post.

And before anyone brings it up, I'm not claiming Ford committed perjury. I'm concerned about the ideas someone else may get in the future.

Crazy people can make bad decisions, and they're not always going to be proven wrong.

https://gizmodo.com/when-a-stranger-...ife-1827546385

[Carabas]

...it would set a precedent that a single uncorroborated allegation released at the last minute is enough to derail a nomination.

Welp, we already have a precedent for just ignoring a nomination if a Democrat did the nominating. Rock bottom has already been reached.

Also, it's hardly a single allegation.

[PaulBullion]

She can be mistaken on that without being a liar.

Again:
She says she cannot be mistaken about it. She is a psychologist and knows how memory works, and she went through it. Would you please accept that if she says that, it is either the truth or she is lying, she could not be mistaken about it.

[Mister Mets]

That was a big reveal to me also when he said that this was some kind of Vengeance for the Clintons movement. How can you have someone this obviously biased as this on the Supreme Court?

Is there anyone who thinks that has nothing to do with the intensity of the opposition to Kavanaugh?

Outlandish, huh? I did find this archived article from 1988 from the NYT: The Reality of Crime on Campus


The article goes into incidents of murder, racial brawls, but there are other incidents of campus crimes mentioned:

• A man on a university campus walks up to a woman he has never met and bites her breast in a collegiate fad known as ''sharking.''
• Four university football players in California gang-rape a woman.

Another quote of interest:



and further:



This is pretty much the environment on campuses in the 1980s

The allegation isn't about anything that happened on campus, but about high school students, so the dynamic is a little different.

There are situations in which high school students have done terrible things. The Stubbenville case is an example.

But this is an uncorroborated allegation about something as bad as that occurred habitually. It isn't just one gang rape; it's several. That goes beyond any news story I'm aware of.

Telling that the White House doesn't want the man who helped bring down Cohen included in the investigation.

This is why you can't take Mets -- and the other Republicans -- seriously on this matter: they complain about a lack of incriminating evidence while simultaneously trying to block or lie about any incriminating evidence at every opportunity.

If you think Avenatti's client's story isn't "credible" then let her be interviewed under oath and then make said judgment -- doing so before all the facts have been gathered is obvious bias.

Avenatti has already proved "credible" with regards to one client (Daniels vs. Trump/Cohen) so there are absolutely no grounds to make the claim that his second client would be any less credible based on reputation alone.

------
"Avenatti Vows to ‘Take the Facts’ to the American People if FBI’s Kavanaugh Probe Doesn’t Include his Client"

"Michael Avenatti blasted as “outrageous” an apparent move by the White House to limit the scope of the FBI investigation into sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and not include a woman he is representing.

“Trump has now determined that he and he alone will be the sole arbiter of whether a woman’s claims of sexual assault and misogyny are credible,” Avenatti said in a tweet Saturday evening. “Why even have an FBI investigation? I thought it was their job to make this determination. He and Kavanaugh are afraid of the truth.”

The response came hours after Avenatti, the high profile lawyer who is weighing a 2020 presidential run, told the The Daily Beast during a stop in New Hampshire that his client Julie Swetnick was “anxious to sit down with the FBI to tell her story...”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/avenat...ude-his-client

I gotta say I don't appreciate the ad hominem attacks. I'm willing to engage in specific arguments, and I'm willing to say when I think Republicans are wrong, either on moral grounds, or because a policy veers too far from the center.

There are two possibilities with what Avenatti's doing. He is either confident that his client is correct in her allegations of specific high school students habitually drugging and gang-raping women. Or he's playing some kind of game.

If he's confident in the information he says he has, he could bring out character witnesses for Swetnick, or provide more information to corroborate the story (IE- naming people who aren't Mark Judge or Brett Kavanaugh.)

If he's playing a game, investigators shouldn't waste finite resources.

Again:
She says she cannot be mistaken about it. She is a psychologist and knows how memory works, and she went through it. Would you please accept that if she says that, it is either the truth or she is lying, she could not be mistaken about it.

But it's not true.

A psychologist can still be mistaken on this stuff. Experts can have blind spots, and it doesn't make them liars.

Welp, we already have a precedent for just ignoring a nomination if a Democrat did the nominating. Rock bottom has already been reached.

Also, it's hardly a single allegation.

Ramirez's testimony is based on hearsay, as well as changing her mind about how sure she was about something.

[Mister Mets]

On the Kavanaugh story, two places posted the same criticism based on an article of the Intercept.

https://politicalwire.com/2018/09/30...ected-to-yale/

The Intercept reports that Brett Kavanaugh lied during his testimony about having no connections to Yale when he said, “I have no connections there. I got there by busting my tail.”

In fact, he was a legacy student: His grandfather, Everett Edward Kavanaugh, also went to Yale as an undergrad, as this yearbook shows.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...le-legacy.html

At one point in the testimony, when Kavanaugh was making the point that he had worked hard and earned his success, Kavanaugh told the committee that he had no connections to Yale before attending. “I have no connections there,” he said. “I got there by busting my tail.”

In reality, Kavanaugh was a legacy student. His grandfather, Everett Edward Kavanaugh, attended Yale as an undergraduate. The Intercept published a photo of a 1928 yearbook as evidence:

Looking at the transcript, he said something different. His comments weren't about Yale, but about Yale Law School.

KAVANAUGH: I would refer you to what I said in the sealed or redacted portion about his relationship with the other two roommates, and I’m going to leave it at that. I will say – Senator, you were asking about college.

I got into Yale Law School. That’s the number one law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college.

One can easily say that it's ridiculous for a Yale undergrad to claim no connection to Yale Law School, but that isn't the argument made here.

I'm curious as to how respectable journalists got this wrong, and what that means.

[aja_christopher]

I gotta say I don't appreciate the ad hominem attacks. I'm willing to engage in specific arguments, and I'm willing to say when I think Republicans are wrong, either on moral grounds, or because a policy veers too far from the center.

It's not an "ad hominem" attack if it's the truth -- your bias comes through in every post, as well as the fact that you ignore the Republicans refusing to release tens of thousands of documents while repeatedly demanding "evidence" that Kavanaugh is not fit to serve on the Supreme Court: that alone makes your arguments hypocritical at root, and worthy of being dismissed on said basis alone.

On top of all of that, this is a sham investigation Mets -- one week for sexual assault allegations against a lifetime appointment: the Republicans weren't singing that song with Hillary or Garland, and I'm not going to sit here and act as if the Democrats are suddenly at fault for DEMANDING that someone like Kavanaugh, who has CREDIBLE allegations against him go through a similarly intense -- and time-consuming if necessary -- process of "investigation".

I'm not even going to humor this nonsense with you -- you come here with these repeated requests for integrity while your Republican party, your Republican president, and even your Supreme Court nominees lie, cheat and steal at every opportunity.

There's no honor among liars, thieves and criminals, Mets, which is why most sensible Republicans are leaving the party: the fact that you're comfortable with someone like Kavanaugh sitting on the Supreme Court only further confirms that you will support said liars and criminals no matter how unethical or corrupt.

[PaulBullion]

But it's not true.

A psychologist can still be mistaken on this stuff. Experts can have blind spots, and it doesn't make them liars.

She knows this is not a blind spot. She knows she is not mistaken.

My god, you are full of it.

[zinderel]

Is there anyone who thinks that has nothing to do with the intensity of the opposition to Kavanaugh?

Yes. No one in their right mind thinks that opposition to Kavanaugh is 'vengeance for the Clintons' except conspiracy theory prone whack jobs on the right. The opposition was CLEARLY based on his blatant bias and his belief that Presidents cannot be prosecuted. And then the accusations came. And then more. And then he lied, repeatedly, under oath about it. And then he threw a tantrum for all the world to see, in which that bias we were all talking sbout BEFORE the allegations came out was on FULL DISPLAY.

Also, Mets, I like how you give an accused rapist the benefit of the doubt, while casting suspicion on Dr. Ford, and Democrats, for 'timing issues' as if the when of the accusations release somehow overrides the importance of the WHAT of the accusation.

I'm not surprised, mind you, I just noticed. And so did everyone else. Party over people, at every opportunity, it seems.

[Mister Mets]

She knows this is not a blind spot. She knows she is not mistaken.

My god, you are full of it.

With a blind spot, a person is unaware that they may be mistaken. It is easy to believe rationally that other people may remember pivotal events incorrectly, but people have a tough time accepting the same of themselves.

Vox had a good piece on this, inspired by a story of false allegations of habitual gang rape at UVA, based on an allegation made by someone whose experiences were much more recent.

Critics have attacked the magazine, wondering why journalists there didn't do their due diligence, fact checking and corroborating every detail of Jackie's account.

This becomes an especially pressing question since it's clear that the reporter relied on Jackie's memory — and decades of research have demonstrated that memories are are malleable, fragile, flawed. Memories can be twisted by time. Misinformation can skew people's memories of events, and completely fabricated memories can even be planted in people such that they weave them into the narrative of their lives.

"Just because someone is telling you something in a lot of detail and with a great amount of confidence," says Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist and one of America's preeminent researchers on memory, "doesn't mean it happened."

This isn't to say Jackie's story is true, or isn't. I haven't talked to her, and don't know what did or didn't happen that night. But, assuming Jackie was the victim of gang rape at UVA as she alleges, it isn't all together surprising that details of her story might be inconsistent and flawed when you consider the science of memory

Between the time of the alleged UVA attack (2012) and the reporting of the story this year, Loftus said, "You could certainly expect memory to fade, to potentially be contaminated, even if not from external suggestion."

Trauma memories — like a brutal rape — can be stored differently, perhaps erroneously. But that's no different from regular memories, Loftus added.

As Vox's Libby Nelson points out, there were reasons Rolling Stone reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, didn't want to pry too much into Jackie's horrendous assault. "[She] seems to have thought she was respecting Jackie's boundaries by not interviewing her alleged rapists. She has said that Jackie asked her not to reach out to the supposed assailant, and Erdely says she complied."

But perhaps, if Erdely thought more about the tricks memory plays, she would have worked harder to verify the facts — no matter how sensitive. If you understand that memory is a foggy patchwork or synthesis of events and exposures in our lives — and some memories aren't real — you would probably hesitate before relying solely on a person's memory.

"It’s very compelling to believe someone's memory," said Loftus, "especially when they cry. But I've seen people cry over false memories, as well as over real ones."