Entries tagged with witch hunt

Crossposts: https://ihcoyc.livejournal.com/247880.html

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Franken

If the criminal justice system decided to proceed against what Franken actually did, it would have gotten pled down to a minor misdemeanor at most. And that would be the correct response by law and precedent. This is how we reward someone who gave up a life of successful minor celebrity to serve his country.

If this is what feminism demands, then fuck feminism. You wonder if they know they've scored an 'own goal'.

Current Mood: disappointed
Crossposts: https://ihcoyc.livejournal.com/247178.html

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An unfair playing field

With regard to the current moral panic about stale claims of sexual misconduct of widely varying types and severity. you should realize that it's much easier to wrong-foot Democrats and liberals by this sort of thing.

Republicans and right-wingers will, of course, circle the wagons, as we're seeing in the case of Roy Moore. For Alabama voters, the choice between a child molester and a liberal is a difficult moral quandary. Roy Moore may have chased children, but he stands up for the piss-ant god they worship down there.

On the other hand Democrats have to at least pay lip service to "feminism", whatever it means anymore. These things target key Democrat constituencies. They implicate Democratic human-resources pieties and 'professional' standards. They have invested a great deal in that kind of elite etiquette. It's much harder for them to shake off these charges levelled against their leadership, no matter how stale or how trivial they may be.

I know it goes against everything you've been taught to root for the home team. But sometimes you have to.

Current Mood: tired
Crossposts: https://ihcoyc.livejournal.com/246914.html

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Signs and limits

There are posted signs and speed limits, and there are the rules of the road people actually live and drive by, and they usually relate to one another only very loosely. The sign says '30 mph' and the thing actually done there is 45 mph; the person who obeys the sign rather than the traffic becomes the stone in the stream, and an annoyance to his neighbors. Sign says 'no turn on red'; usage says 'fuck it'.

When there is a "crackdown" and the rules as written are suddenly enforced, people have every right to rebel. The victims of enforcement are losers at one of life's lotteries and don't really deserve it either. They did nothing everybody else wasn't doing.

The difference between these traffic enforcement situations and the current round of stale persecutions is that many of them are about things that there weren't any written rules for, even. Yes, the facts will always very. But at the very least, Louis CK apparently did all that the law required of him. Now suddenly a copped feel thirty years ago is supposed to be a Big Deal. If it wasn't then, the passage of thirty years should not turn it into a present outrage.

The new sexual McCarthyism is like traffic cameras that see into the past and issue citations for the way you drove thirty years ago. If you get one from back then in the present you get fired, you become the object of a social media shitstorm, the target of a congressional investigation, and your movie isn't released. Because a faceless mob has decided out of the blue that punishing people who drove recklessly thirty years ago is now a major priority.

I am going to continue to have a problem with that.