Kavanaugh and Perjury

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Oh my god it's sooooooooooooo hilarious calling people rapists, pro-rape, and joking around about destroying their lives.



Oh, phew! It's all just sarcasm, gaiz!

R34d!nG c0mPR34eshUn!!!

- Doc

[_Gunnar]

Makes perfect sense to me. I'm frankly unsure of how it doesn't make sense to anyone else. I suppose just because their experience differs. In other threads we've gotten into the immigration debate. I've talked about how I've seen neighborhoods in my area turn into ghettos as this problem continues to grow worse. Crime up. School system gone to hell. Dead bodies being dropped near my house. Game cameras snapping pictures of guys with guns roaming on my land. It's no different with these other issues. Abortion being legal in an area will influence the culture in that area. Gay marriage being legal in an area will influence the culture in that area. Alcohol being legal in an area will influence the culture in that area. It raises obvious questions like how does it potentially impact public school curriculum? Sex education? Etc.

I call bovine excrement on most of what you said here. As already pointed out several times on this forum, a number of reputable studies have shown that even undocumented immigrants have less than half the crime rate of born in the USA citizens, and legal immigrants' crime rates are lower still. Furthermore, communities with a higher percentage of immigrants, whether documented or not, tend to have lower overall crime rates than communities with few immigrants. Your bigotry and confirmation bias is shining through bright and clear here.

[_honorentheos]

What's the argument here, Water Dog? I understood the question was regarding the specific quote which is clearly a sarcastic comment made in response to Kavanaugh actually being confirmed as Supreme Court justice. If you want to expand the discussion to people taking their contempt and vitriol to the level where they are willing to do violence, are you arguing this is a one-sided problem?

[_Some Schmo]

Rapublicans are rapologists.

Sounds about right.

[Guest]

duped post. please delete

[_Water Dog]

The GOP has gone full savage, I love it. Oh man, y'all really screwed up with this. It will be a month of insane rhetoric from democrats, demonizing republicans and men everywhere as rapists and such things. I do not believe it will work out for you in the polls. The comments on my UFC threads are telling. Y'all miss the point completely. The tide of public opinion is turning against you.

[_EAllusion]

I love how EAllusion feels this constant, unrelenting need to remind everyone how incredibly smart he is and then invents an opponent's position which he can coveniently counter.

I wish there was some sort of logical fallacy that embodies his posting style and could be succinctly descibed... Some sort of weird habit of setting up some sort of argument that's not being made, and then sort of 'knocking it over', as it were...

- Doc

It's impressive how often you inaccurately accuse others of strawman argumentation when you constantly engage in it yourself. If only there was a word for that phenomenon.

Anywho, she's obviously being sarcastic. It's not a close call. You should be able to pick up from the context of liberals thinking the idea that Kavanaugh having his life ruined as conservative commentary hyperbolicly claimed is ridiculous and the fact that he just got on the Supreme Court that she's being sarcastic. That was immediately apparent before I knew she was a Colbert writer, which makes it even more clear in retrospect. Water Dog quoted me pointing this out, then also quoted me pointing out a WSJ headline went with a rape pun to suggest politically biased reading. Noting that's what he is doing isn't a strawman, and both of those readings are correct. Pointing out that Kavanaugh hasn't had his life literally ruined - quite the opposite - should be your first blaring clue that she's using irony.

My last comment was a jab on how conservative culture tends to be poor at reading comprehension, not a brag about intelligence. The study I referred to specifically found that Trump is uniquely appealing to people with poor verbal cognitive ability:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10. ... lCode=sppa

*shrugs* What fun we have.

[Guest]

My daughter and I were discussing the confirmation on Friday as a result of her being in a high school civics class where the teacher had attempted to present news coverage and the underlying governmental structures for confirming a justice through current events. Yet it was clear that even among high school seniors the entire matter could not be kept separate from people's partisan leanings and they ended up having to preemptively end any discussion about it. My daughter is savvy enough to recognize she is liberal leaning which influences her perspective, and was frustrated telling me about people in her class who represented the more extreme ends of the spectrum who she felt made bad arguments that she couldn't support even if she generally shared their desired outcome of seeing Kavanaugh replaced with a different nominee. She made a comment about how emotional everyone was about it and it led us to talking about emotion as part of how we as humans engage with information to try and determine what is true or not.

I made the point that if our subconscious is the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary success going back to the very first life forms, then we can't dismiss the importance emotion and non-rational though plays in our decision making processes. But we also have to recognize that executive, reasoned thinking that relies on systematic approaches to sorting through evidence to arrive at supported conclusions is what elevates us as a species beyond primal tribal animals into cultured humankind. They both have important roles to play in decision making. Yet in my opinion, this entire process around Kavanaugh's confirmation couldn't be better scripted to fall apart along partisan lines. Emotionally, I think most people who watched Ford's testimony at least initially intuited her as presenting a sincere, truthful account of her own experience. This seems to have been clear from the reactions before Kavanaugh's testimony from such outlets as Fox News and Trump's reported reaction to her. There were certainly exceptions, and people who reacted negatively to her testimony but those seem to be minority views. OTOH, Kavanaugh's testimony seems to have really divided people in terms of their emotional reaction to it. My personal intuition was he wasn't behaving as someone I'd trust and it raised suspicions in my mind as to his trustworthiness. Yet he also clearly energized other people with his intense, emotional and raw response to the accusations that understandably could be read as someone lashing out at unfair treatment. The challenge then became what evidence was available to use to try and sort things out systematically to try and guard against emotional biases or reframe one's intuited reactions? And the truth is, there isn't much that could be agreed on while the bits and pieces available seemed almost perfectly formed to be used as justification for one's partisan position.

Because we treat our emotional, subconscious truth-filters as reliable - and because the reactions were so deeply felt yet polarizing opposite across the nation - we ended up with the worst possible results. The facts seem to support what we see as obviously so, making those with whom we are now in disagreement villains given they are clearly acting against the evidence in order to enforce a partisan outcome we individually view as contemptible if not outright evil.

But it's all based on our subconscious emotions since the facts aren't available to mitigate effectively and serve as a systematic framework. One couldn't script a more perfect worst case scenario, in my opinion.

[_EAllusion]

Thinking there wasn't sufficient evidence that Kavanaugh engaged in a sexual assault attempt doesn't make you pro-rape or whatever, but conservative commentary on this issue, including from the Senate itself, was up to its eyeballs in rape apologetics. It was a pretty disheartening display, especially because it doesn't feel necessary at the end of the day. Do you call them, meaning those who engaged in it or were complicit with it, pro-rape as a result of that? I don't know. It's more that they'll say anything to circle the wagons and if that includes rape apologia, then so be it.

[_honorentheos]

Thinking there wasn't sufficient evidence that Kavanaugh engaged in a sexual assault attempt doesn't make you pro-rape or whatever, but conservative commentary on this issue, including from the Senate itself, was up to its eyeballs in rape apologetics. It was a pretty disheartening display. Do you call them, meaning those who engaged in it or were complicit with it, pro-rape as a result of that? I don't know. It's more that they'll say anything to circle the wagons and if that includes rape apologia, then so be it.

Yeah. I agree with this. I also think the same can be pointed to on the other side as well. Being willing to call someone a rapist, or a rape-apologist because (as is the case with Senator Collins, in my opinion) they couldn't treat Kavanaugh as guilty so they did what they would have done otherwise is also doing violence to what those terms actually mean.