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Lessons to be learned from the Kavanaugh Hearing

Thermal said:
What are you demanding, thirty year old video or all accusers are liars?
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I don't think that's necessary. However, the accusations should have either been reported to law enforcement for investigation or not progressed beyond the letter to Feinstein. Since it is impossible to corroborate* the accusations at this point, they should never have seen the public light of day. Whoever leaked that letter committed a grievous error. This goes to the question I asked before that no one seems to want to touch: What is the best and fairest way to deal with these kinds of allegations?

Disagree with me? Just imagine this was you. You know yourself; you know you didn't do this. But here are the accusations anyway and you are now in a no-win situation. Is it fair to you that you have to defend yourself, not in court, but in the court of public opinion? Do you just have to live with the stigma now even though there is absolutely no evidence that you did anything at all? I keep hearing how this isn't court; therefore, there is no presumption of innocence. That's crazily unfair! I think the fairest approach, in cases where someone is accused of a crime, is to report the crime to law enforcement, not the court of public opinion. I believe that the justice system, with it's presumption of innocence and adversarial process, is the best system we have for finding the truth. Even 35 years later. Let the police, prosecutors and defense hash out the truth. This case wouldn't have even made it to the prosecutors for lack of evidence.

I think Kavanagh could plausibly said that he attended parties in his younger days where he was drinking heavily and there were promiscuous young ladies in attendance (subtly throwing shade on his accusers) but that he did not assault them. Perhaps he could have spun it to having a history of being one-of-the-boys who cleaned up his act and made good. The whole thing would have been done and done.
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That is not remotely likely. If he were to admit that, he would be seen as more likely guilty than not. It would have most likely derailed his nomination. It's the same reason why Clinton perjured himself over irrelevant details -if he had sex with Lewinsky, then the perception (unfairly, IMO) is that it's more likely he assaulted Jones. Again, no-win situation.

It's the transparent lying about it to hoist this halo up that should make us take accusations seriously. Swetnick indeed has been inconsistent (Avanetti?). Kavanaugh has LIED, and absurdly so.
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That's the thing. Whether or not he was a blackout drinker back in the day has no bearing on whether or not he is guilty of sexual assault. For that matter, whether or not a woman is "promiscuous" has no bearing on whether or not she was sexually assaulted. I know plenty of people who drank to excess in our high school days; in fact, I'm sure that many of us here did as well. Does that make any of us likely sexual assaulters? Does writing a phrase in a yearbook mean that you likely assaulted someone? No, those are non-probative details but as you show here, it makes people think you probably did it if someone makes an accusation against you. People lie about those irrelevant details that make them look bad. Not saying it's the right thing to do (heck, I even agree it's a good enough reason to yank him from consideration), but it's an understandable human foible. No-win.




*When I use the word corroborate, I mean it in the strictest sense: No one can say, "I saw this happen," or "I heard about this contemporaneously," or even, "I remember that party." To me, corroboration requires that someone can lend direct evidence that the event in question was likely to have occurred; we don't have that. At best, we have, "Ford told me about that 30 years later." Which doesn't prove anything other than the telling. IMO, neither side has had their story corroborated -which is what we should expect for events 35 years ago.
 
Ziggurat said:
That doesn't make sense, since he wasn't a senior or 18 when the events with Ford were alleged to have taken place. That wouldn't be a mystery to the committee. Nor does he ever claim that he only drank while a senior. And I think there's a rather obvious alternative reason for him to say this, which is simply to point out that alcohol was commonly and easily available to highschoolers.
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He wasn't addressing the committee, he was addressing the court of public opinion.

Just like when Louis C.K. wrote his apology letter, prominently stating that "I never showed a woman my **** without asking first," and suddenly all his supporters were writing "HE ASKED FIRST!!" in all caps, ignoring that he did not wait for an affirmative response or that one of the cases didn't involve him asking at all.

I don't think he was successful in creating that impression, but in any normal conversation that included that sentence, someone who was not particularly familiar with the law would read it to mean that Kavanaugh drank legally.
 
Cavemonster said:
I have a hard time seeing the highlighted as anything other than an attempt to suggest that his drinking was legal without outright stating what he knew to be a falsehood.
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I think its a way to point out that people in his school, the seniors, had easy to access to alcohol; therefore, everyone had easy access to alcohol. For kids in HS before the age was set to 21 in their State, this is a common enough experience that there is no confusion.

I'll absolutely agree that it isn't perjury. But I would consider a disingenuous attempt to create an inaccurate impression to be an incredibly poor sign of character in this situation.

I find this to be rampant in Trump's circle. Making statements that any normal observer would take as an assertion of something that don't technically outright say it. Plausible deniability baked in. I find it more reprehensible than outright lying.
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Nah, it's just your own biases creeping in to your interpretation of the words.
 
I learned that rape is a quantum effect, for this is all about a Schrödinger's Rape: I believe Ford's accusation, but at the same time I really believe Kavanough's rejection of the accusation, so in my mind, BK at the same time did AND didn't assault Ford in 1982. And the probability wave function fluctuates wildly as the situation develops.

I learned that I much sooner trust a candidate for SC who is brutally honest about his own youthful days and its follies, consequences be damned, than this guy who, whether perjuriously so or not, answered or evaded serious and pertinent questions essentially with a view to deceive and deflect.

He ought to have admitted that he drank entirely too much too often and too young, did goofy or obnoxious things while drunk, etc etc, but did not assault Ford nor anyone, ever, for he is sure he'd remember that, and doesn't. I'd confirm him then (assuming I was qualified to judge his career as a legal professional and it came out favorably).
 
xjx388 said:
I think its a way to point out that people in his school, the seniors, had easy to access to alcohol; therefore, everyone had easy access to alcohol. For kids in HS before the age was set to 21 in their State, this is a common enough experience that there is no confusion.

Nah, it's just your own biases creeping in to your interpretation of the words.
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"X was legal for people in group Y at the time, yeah, we did X"

In any conversational context, I'm going to read that as an attempt to claim that the speaker was in group Y at the time and that they did X legally. Nothing to do with the specifics of this case.
 
xjx388 said:
I think its a way to point out that people in his school, the seniors, had easy to access to alcohol; therefore, everyone had easy access to alcohol.
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This interpretation would also be misleading, because when Kavanaugh was 17, at the time the alleged events took place, the legal age had been raised to 21, so he would not have had easy access to alcohol legally purchased by 18 year olds, because they also could not legally purchase alcohol for him.
 
Cavemonster said:
This interpretation would also be misleading, because when Kavanaugh was 17, at the time the alleged events took place, the legal age had been raised to 21, so he would not have had easy access to alcohol legally purchased by 18 year olds, because they also could not legally purchase alcohol for him.
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Except that those who were already 18 at the time the law went into effect were grandfathered in, so yes, they still could.
 
Hellbound said:
On the other hand, he could have just actually answered the question he was asked, then people on both sides wouldn't have to guess at what he meant.
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"If it pleases the court I'm not saying that at no point did I didn't not have no access to situations where there was no alcohol not there."
 
Hellbound said:
On the other hand, he could have just actually answered the question he was asked, then people on both sides wouldn't have to guess at what he meant.
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He did. He was asked if he drank alcohol during his high school years. He answered yes. There's absolutely no ambiguity in that.
 
I've learned that a thread that's ostensibly only about lessons learned on a subject will end up just being a spillover argument of the main thread on the subject, and points and posts will be almost hopelessly hard to follow.
 
Belz... said:
Unfortunately, it's also an observation that women and minorities always seem short-changed by American conservatives. And that's an issue I see, as an outsider to this: both the left and the right are obsessed with race and sex.
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Do you think I'm obsessed with race and sex?
 
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