Forty Two wrote: ↑Fri Sep 28, 2018 12:24 pm
I shake my head sometimes, wondering what has happened to reason and critical thinking.
Nobody alleges "women just make these things up to harm powerful men...."
What is alleged is that women are human beings, and as such what individual women do runs the entire spectrum of truth-telling to lie-telling. Most people who accuse another person of a crime are not lying - most people don't go around making things up about other people. That's because most people are good and at least want to be honest.
However, even though most people who accuse another person of punching them in the face, if someone came forward 36 years later after never having reported previously that a candidate for public appointed office punched them in the face at a party in high school, we would generally want evidence and we would also ask why it was not reported previously. We also know that sometimes, a person lies and when they say they were punched in the face, there are an infinite number of possible reasons a person might have (under varying circumstances) to not report that accurately. Women are not exempt.
If a candidate or nominee were accused of embezzling funds from a high school club, or stealing his bandmate's guitar, or cheating on a test, we would ask why we are only hearing about it now and what's the evidence. Women are not exempt. We would ask for witnesses. We would wonder, if four named witnesses deny the accusations, if it actually occurred at all. Nobody uncritically believes the victim in any other circumstance to the point of crediting the allegations and disqualifying someone based on the accusation under those circumstances.
That's not because we are saying that people make things up to harm powerful men - not in any other context of wrongful or criminal conduct. We know most accusations are generally true. But, we also know that human beings have a propensity to lie. In fact, it's true that everybody in the world lies in some form or another from time to time. We also know that they can and are wrong, mistaken, and even mentally unstable or mentally ill from time to time. Women are not exempt.
We know that where there is a motive to lie (financial, political, personal, whatever), that some people will lie. We know that to credit accusation which conveniently are disclosed at a key moment to harm another person, that there is reason to require proof or reason to believe the allegations. Women are not exempt.
Saying person John Smith's allegation needs to be corroborated before we act in reliance on it is not saying that "all men lie to harm other people..." Why would we think differently when the allegation is made by a woman?
It is completely irrational and illogical to say that we should believe without corroboration the word of accuser John Smith because the vast majority of men do not lie about criminal accusations. Why in the world would we think it's rational and logical to say that we should believe without corroboration the word of accuser Jane Doe because the vast majority of women do not lie about criminal accusations?
What this meme and this thought process (which has infected so many people these days) does is say that we should take a statistic (most people accused of crime are guilty) and attribute it to individual cases (since most people accused of crime are guilty, it's reasonable to assume or conclude that an individual accused person is guilty). Then we can say "if a few men are hurt by the few false allegations that might from time to time occur, so be it." It is a reversal of the burden of proof, and not just the criminal burden of proof in trials, but the burden of proof of reason and skepticism - that a person making an epistemological claim, an empirical claim, a circumstantial claim, an claim about a phenomenon or an event - a claim that reality is X -- that claim will not be accepted unless verified, corroborated, tested, or supported by convincing proof, evidence or reason.
Yes, in a court of law we uphold the principle of the presumption of innocence for the defendant in order to avoid the trail proceeding upon the fallacious grounds that the defendant is the one who has to prove that they didn't do the crime. In a court of law it would not be up to Mr Kavanaugh to prove his innocence but up to prosecutors to demonstrate that Ms Ford was telling the truth.
This, however, was not a court of law or a TV court room drama - though it certainly had that look and feel about it didn't it(?)
Ms Ford came forward voluntarily, as a 'civic duty', to tell the committee what happened to her. In this non-judicial setting the only consideration we or the committee can really make is whether we believed her testimony or not. It's a shame that so many people formed and declared a judgement on the validity and veracity of her testimony before it was given, but this is a highly-charge political environment and I guess that was always going to happen.
I agree, 36 years is a long time ago, and who among us who've lived that long can remember the exact details of the significant events and experiences which we do remember having back then? We remember the broad strokes, going to that gig or this sporting event for example, but we don't remember all the nitty-gritty about it - mostly we just remember that it happened and the detail which makes it significant for us: that we were there, that the band played our favourite song or that our team won/lost, who we went with, and we remember the feeling - or at least we remember that we felt the feeling. We also know that our memories are associative: that we might go years or decades without that experience impinging on our consciousness at all until something triggers a memory - a passing sound or a smell; a song on the radio; something we overheard on the train, or perhaps; when someone asks us directly.
So by my lights, this is not about whether Mr Kavanaugh committed a crime and that we can be assured of his guilt by a criminal standard of evidence, or that Ms Ford's obligation is to provide that kind of evidence, but whether Ms Ford is believable in the context of what she says happened to her and the intervening decades.
In response to questioning Ms Ford was patchy on the detail, but it is to her credit that she didn't seek to hide or obfuscate what she couldn't provide. She said she wished she could be more helpful and apologised for not being able to answer question about important details which, if provided, would have obliged Mr Kavanaugh to go a lot further in his denials.
Ms Ford came across as an honest and sincere, non-political witness, who acknowledged her memories were patchy and incomplete, but she was very sure on the kind of significant detail which affixes events and experiences in our memories: that she was at the party, that she was sexually assaulted, that there was more than one person in the room, the laughter, that she felt powerless and frightened.
I believed her - and the fact that she couldn't provide all the minor details only made her testimony more honest, more credible, more real. And most importantly I think, I believed her when she was asked how sure she was that the young Mr Kavanaugh had been her attacker. She said she was "100%" sure, and if there's one thing you're not going to forget about a sexual assault it's your attacker - especially when that attacker is known to you, and especially when we all know that our first sexual experiences as teenagers are both memorable and significant for any number of reasons: even terrible experiences.
For this reason I think it's rather disingenuous of commentators to try and have this both ways: to say that they believe that she believes she was sexually assaulted but that they don't actually believe she was, or if she was that it was Mr Kavanaugh. I also think it's disingenuous to suggest that we should give equal weight or consideration to the ideas that she could just as easily be making it up as be telling the truth on the basis that 'human beings have a propensity to lie' and that when we do lie we obviously have some motive for doing so. As I've said before, if we're going to apply that imaginable possibility to Ms Ford then we should really be applying it to Mr Kavanaugh also.
In contrast to Ms Ford politeness and eagerness to be helpful, Mr Kavanaugh appeared trenchant, indignant, confrontational, obfuscatory, deflective, and accusatory. Now, one might say that he has every right to be angry and to express it, but given that he's been nominated to a position which requires dispassionate independence and political neutrality his attacks on Democrats in particular, seemingly co-ordinated with Republicans in both detail and language, appear wholly at odds with a position on the US Supreme Court.
Nonetheless, I think he'll ascend to the empty chair where -- given his political affiliations and religious views -- the Supreme Court's dispassionate review of the law and the constitution will be further compromised by the fickle whim of partisan political necessity.
