Al Franken is Gone, Sexual Harassment Allegations are Harming Democrats

Amusing how, despite the fact that I'm quite obviously not willing to engage them in their demeaning, slanderous, and otherwise shallow behavior, they still continue to insult and attack me. Almost as if they have nothing worthwhile to say.

Positively charming

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This from a pair of moderators no less.

An entertaining diversion, but a diversion none the less.

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Round and round and round it goes, and how much effect is all this vitriol and anger having on the end result? Absolutely zero - as, it would seem, is intended... and yet I'm the "troll". Sometimes I cannot help but be amazed at the hypocrisy of it all; then I remember that people are just crazy all around.

I guess, in the end, it is irrelevant - after all, until we resolve a number of other issues in our "democracy", we the people won't be able to force our legislators to pick up and work on these issues over the demands of their corporate sponsors, not to mention the safety of their gerrymandered districts - issues that have yet to see a good solution come to light.

 

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i can't believe i'm reading this. is this you minimizing sexual harassment or is this pertaining to something else? you think forgiveness works?

those same people you assume would forgive you, don't operate that way, they would fuk you over big time if they were offended and only thing stopping them usually is the law, or else it's done behind closed doors. on the flipside, they are taking 'advantage' and would play you for a fool if you just forgave as that is reinforcement that there are no consequences and would up the ante.

pay attention: everything is about advantage (no ethics) with a perpetrator.

you are jerking everyone's chain right?

oh, i forgot, you are a christian and your assbackward nutter values and logic you admit sometimes.

the discrepancy with the logic you posted is it works only with breaking the cycle of being cruel to 'innocent' people, thereby creating more victims. that's what assholes do.

it is not cruel to punish (deterrrant) those who did wrong. that's the only way to stop those who don't operate based on any morals, except harm to themselves.

i'm just curious kitta, why is it that my stepfather and mother taught me that i should forgive others and especially them but when i did, it just made it easier for them to keep abusing. why did it not stop them, kitta? why did they just steamroll over all my rights when i was being forgiving? could it be that because there was no deterrant? you do realize there are plenty of other people out there who will take advantage of your forgiveness and play you 'continually' like a sucker if you do that, unless they get a bite on their own ass (deterrant).

i know common sense seems lost on you at times but it's not that hard to figure out that forgiveness can be abused, those who apologize can be insincere and those you forgive may see it as a sign to continue unabated or easy pickings to take advantage.

do try and figure this out.

 

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I dare say you are reading too deeply into a simple sentiment.

Forgiving someone does not always mean absolving them of punishment or responsibility. It does not mean you forget what has happened. It does not mean that you save to accept them back into your life.

Case in point - I have forgiven my father for being a physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic because carrying that anger was poisoning me, and me alone. I still have nothing to do with him, and will not let him have any part of my life or my child's life, because I know he is not trustworthy.

That your family used it as a means to continue harming you is tragic. I have to ask, though - does lingering on what happened give you any joy, or does it only make you angry or miserable?

How does it go? Hating someone is like drinking poison and expecting it to hurt them, or something to that effect?

Of course, the fact that you couldn't help but attempt petty attacks upon my beliefs (as well as me personally) is noted, disregarded, and ultimately forgiven - simply because I consider my happiness and well being to be worth it.

 

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you are dishonest and your statement was lame unless it was directed at the arguing/insults on this thread, which it obviously wasn't.

the bolded part is exactly what you meant as in absolving of responsibility, otherwise what would be the point of making such a statement on such a topic as this?

you most definitely posted that one statement to insinuate that those who are sexually harassed should just let it slide (forgive) because in no way does what your father did or how i feel about my personal issues have any bearing on the right or wrong of sexual harassment.

that stance of easy forgiveness (no deterrants) has very dangerous implications for cultural values especially when it's a matter of public record and setting an example for the public as to what a person can get away with doing or how much with lip service apologies (often fake or shallow). this because the fact is both perpetrators or would-be perpetrators in society are watching and taking note just as well as everyone else.

this is how perpetrators just as well as victims have been able to gauge the social and political climate of what they can get away with easily or how difficult it will be for victims to get justice or if they are minimized. this is all taken in by sociopaths and non-sociopaths alike.

all you are doing is showing how wily and untrustworthy you are as a professed christian.

 

Yep. It's not happening like you predicted. A month later, no additional moral high ground was gained, no organized and concerted effort to pressure for Trump's resignation has appeared.

Dishonest.
And remarkably self-blind (I'm not the party pitching the fits here).
And you're getting into straight trolling now.

With a straight face - really, that was not a joke: Bell's sincerely believes that, in its simple bottom layer meaning.
And that's a problem, with this faction. They don't recognize their reflections.

No, I haven't. I have been correcting - and then merely labeling, for the repetition - your dishonest claims of "that" on three threads now.

All of those are examples of posts you misrepresented, lied about, and used for lies and misrepresentations to slander me - namecall, troll, bs, the whole ugly mess you've been posting in response to me. Digging won't erase your responses.

Repeatedly. Over and over. After correction, after attempts at dealing with your posting as if it were honest misunderstanding, after multiple attempts at discussion.

You can't post honestly.

And this inability to deal honestly with my posting - or any discussion of that kind - is common enough in this faction to do significant harm in the upcoming Minnesota elections.

Repetition works in such causes, which is the danger of that kind of posting, and why I have been persistent in labeling it - there is a genuine risk of significant harm from such lies, misrepresentations, and slanders, as they fountain out from the similarly self-oblivious in that DFL-associated faction during the 2018 elections in Minnesota.

That begs the questions of when and how and under what circumstances - key questions, given the political situation.
And it isn't true - serving out his term under the appropriate cloud, with retirement announced in advance, was also available.

But that's because you have no conception of a world in which reasonable people with high moral standards would know better than to lump Franken's behavior with Harvey Weinstein's in the first place, let alone make a moral high ground and political cause of that lumping.

If you abandon reason, power and money is what is left to make policy. If you diminish your power and money at the same time, the policy will be made by those who did not. The DFL/DNC mishandling of Franken did that. They have maybe thirty weeks to recover.

We see a glimmer of self-awareness, justifying the label "lie".
Doubt about what, slippery troll? Are you going to claim what you did before, about my posting, or something else? Because you were lying, slandering, and misrepresenting about those posts of mine, earlier. And now you are being vague.

When I mentioned such things, you mean - as obvious but minor aspects, not worth detail or emphasis, even possibly honest memory mistakes or misunderstandings. They illustrated, by example, the reality of believing such accounts, an issue which you for some reason had decided to claim was central to my posts. That was your troll, whether or not I believed Franken's victims - I just took them for granted, not of course being an idiot about it (Tweeden's was obviously a coached and rhetorically sophisticated and carefully planned Republican hit, to be read accordingly by anyone other than the hopelessly naive).

Nobody plans to advocate for idiocy, naivety, and gullibility as aspects of a moral high ground to which voters will flock, surely - any such programs would be unintentional, we assume.

So how is it that completely accurate and ordinary factual observations, that any reasonable person would take for granted, trigger slander and misrepresentation?
And how can we deflect the damage that can do to the DFL in the upcoming Minnesota elections?

 

I'll be honest - I stopped reading here...

You go ahead and believe whatever you want to believe birch. I simply don't have time (or, honestly, the care) for those looking to misinterpret things so they can find an excuse to be upset.

Though, thank you for proving my point for me.

 

Yeah—

—that's what I thought.

 

Nah, I simply see no reason to bother with your inconsequential loquaciousness.

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After all - regardless of what I say, you will find some way to interpret it as a reason to be offended.

 

*Yawn* More insults and ad hom from the gallery. This is why I've been ignoring you... seems like you can't go long without attacking someone. All you've got is name calling Bells... I rather pity you, actually.

Now this, this is deliciously ironic, coming from you of all people. Oh well, back to the shadows you go.

 

Well, how you deal with someone who hurt you is your own question. Actually being smart enough to understand the difference between hating someone and working to prevent future harm should be your own problem.

Were you, what, informed? smart? calm? enough to discuss deeper issues regarding sexual violence in American society, you would be able to countenance more than petty masculinism and superficial electoral speculation, and conduct yourself than a little better dignity at least than overt malice. As a result, you have made yourself into an example of rape culture.

Take a moment with yourself, Kittamaru; think about the person you are and the person you want to be, because the person you show us will be perpetually shadowed by this spectre of hatred until you find some way to overcome it; what you will put into that malice, deliberately wasting pages↗ demonstrating your own inauspicious note about rape culture, and, really, for what, to treat someone so poorly as to pretend to pity them↑?

We don't doubt your motives for such abusive behavior. If you really, really want people to believe this is the person you are, keep pushing; eventually, we have no choice but to take your word.

 

It should be everyone's problem, as you say, to work to prevent harm to others. The societal benefit far outweighs the rather minor individual burden, to say nothing of simple morality.

Petty insults, check.

Unfounded (and quite entertaining) slanderous remark, check.

Unchecked superiority complex, check. Yep... it's a Tiassa™ post!

See, here's the thing Tiassa- you and Bells have both advertised your dishonest and abusive behavior for so long that the rest of us cannot help but believe it to be true; this psychological projection of something, inadequacy perhaps, is so deeply ingrained in your every post that it makes the act of simply reading them an absolute chore, knowing one is wading into an absolute quagmire of empty words and hollow accusations. Maybe if you engaged with others in something even resembling honest discussion, instead of these vapid attempts to put others down, then folks would take you seriously.

I hold no delusions that we will see such a change in behavior, though.

 

And yet, Bells, you insist on making it about me... you are utterly transfixed with me. It's unhealthy, Bells, and I would recommend you seek help.

You have a vastly over-inflated sense of self importance, Bells. The fact that you actually believe I have been posting for your benefit is hilarious.

Again, you seem desperate for attention, claiming it is all about you... there are others in the room, Bells.

Continued slander and bullshit - cute

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See, Bells, here's the thing - I look in the mirror and I'm quite content with what I see; someone who continues to grow, day by day, beyond the young adult who was so depressed and abused that he attempted suicide several times; someone who has found, both internally and externally, reasons to push through the bad days, enjoy the good days, and give his best every day for the woman he cares about more than anything in the world (within a few days, it will be her and our baby boy).

I look in the mirror, Bells, and I see the faults that I work to remedy every day, and I see the scars that years of making myself the target of an abusive alcoholic father so he'd leave my mother and brother alone have left. I see the good, the bad, and the ugly... and through it all, I see the woman that stands by my side and not only helps me to be better than I am, but accepts me for who I am, and has helped me to accept myself.

I look in the mirror, Bells, and I am happy with what I see.

Can you say the same?

All that said, I see neither of you has decided to engage honestly or truthfully on this matter... so I think I'll be passing on your posts for the foreseeable future - after all, I've no need for such toxic folks in my life. "Have fun stormin' da castle."

 

Non sequitur; we'll try it this way: Actually being smart enough to understand the difference between "hating someone" and "working to prevent future harm" should be your own problem.

It will be helpful when you learn the difference between discussing the issues and petulant egotism, which is why you need to understand, Kittamaru—

—that when all you have to run on is ignorance and egocentrism, it kind of stands out: Your assessments are unreliable. Your late appeals to emotion are unbelievable, which is why they aren't having any useful effect.

So when you boast↑ that you're happy when you look in the mirror; when you need to reach out and attack people as you have, bratty declarations such as, "I've no need for such toxic folks in my life", are about on schedule. You know who other people don't need in their lives? Rape advocates.

Start thinking for yourself, Kittamaru. You don't even know how you got in this deep; you show no apparent knowledge, skill, or other faculty for extricating yourself from the pit you've dug.

It is not insignificant to observe that at no point in recent threads about these subjects have you actually had a clue what you were on about.

You are not happy with what you see when you look in the mirror if you need to treat people as you have. Stop lying to yourself, and stop putting the people around you through this. If your behavior is worth more to you than cheap aesthetics, then please consider that no, you are not believable when you say you are happy with what you see in the mirror else you wouldn't need to reach out to sustain the conflict. Go back and look through your own posts in these threads; you will find yourself answering others, such as Iceaura, about other issues, such as superficial electoral politics, and in some of those posts reaching out to call in other people, such as Bells or Tiassa. When you invite dispute, as you have, and then to pretend to be a victim when people answer, no, you don't convince anyone of anything by reciting the sad portions of your life story in order to tell us how happy you are with yourself, denounce others, and wash your hands of a discussion you refuse to leave be.

Thus, like your unreliable self-assessment, neither is your judgment of toxicity reliable.

Remember the contrast, please: You failed basics about due process and employment alike; see also our exchange at #50↑ - 51↑; in the latter you lead with an expression of confusion about elitism and classism and then fall back into electoral politicking; it would seem you also failed basic classism. Furthermore, if we look to another recent thread there is a brief post in which I respond to your inquiry↗ by pointing out that I explained something most recently when I explained it after already having explained it. There is a reason you kept asking, and it's very similar to the reason why another might intervene↑ with dismissal and a change of subject to what would otherwise be laughably stupid except for its deliberate disruptive purpose. And if it seems nearly emblematic that this little bit can orbit #50 above, that's part of how the behavior you display works once it sets in any given circumstance; you don't know, so you won't recognize, so you keep asking. But, yes, in that moment, when one of our neighbors began putting on his mgtow, you blew basic classism. You ignored the answer to your own demand such that you would eventually make the demand again a little over a week later↑, and appear to have ignored the response↑, as you asked again the next day↗. So go back to that confusion about elitism and classism in #51. Think about it, not only were you answered, but you were also pointed to a class issue; not only did you pass over the answer to your demand, you declared your confusion over the classism issue and tacked to electoral politics.

There is a certain degree to which the subject changes are understandable; people generally prefer to feel empowered or, at the very least, not utterly disempowered, when discussing these issues. So you keep switching back to what looks like something you think you know; it's very human behavior. But at the same time you seek empowerment, as I noted last month↑ by telling people what they think and argue, and as much as you might wish to protest such notions↑, it does not escape notice that when given examples reminding of your own posts↑ you dropped that part long enough to botch up due process↑.

Looking over pattern of unattended loose ends about your argument and presentation is not entirely unsurprising; sustained determination, however, does not say anything about the character of your argument, so the difference between what you think you're doing and what other people see really is invested in how you see yourself in the mirror. It's not quite axiomatic that everyone says they're happy with what they see in the mirror until they are angry at everyone else for not helping them feel better about themselves, but, still. It's kind of like reminding, repeatedly↑, look what you called "reason"; we can even tell you why we perceive a problem↑, and all you're interested in is bawling your way to political speculation↑.

And when ignorance is the persistent theme about why it is somehow unfair to be disdainful toward your conduct—(really, you're innocent, and didn't know, and how dare anyone fail to properly appreciate that!)—it might help if you actually showed signs of learning something, now and then, instead of repeatedly invoking a coincidence of changing the subject and then, later, asking anew for reiteration of what you already ignored.

†​

Here is a trivia question, Kittamaru, that is not necessarily trivial:

If I choose that today is the day to split a hair with my friend, on this occasion 'twixt empathy and sympathy, am I zinging her or reiterating for broader consumption something she already knows?

And I won't even hold that one in suspense: Empathy is one step removed, compared to sympathy. Empathy requires translation before it projects; sympathy does not. Neither is it any mystery that sympathy can be wrong in its presuppositions; for our purposes, though, empathy is much more vulnerable to such errors, and also according to implications, and what that means, more simply, is that while sympathy can estimate wrongly how any given person perceives a common experience, ego defense priorities of emapthetic projection can be dangerously revealing, less a rorschach than a series of cryptic neon signs telling us what that empathy really finds important.

Oh, right, simply: She can say all she wants about learning empathy; at some point, you learned it, too; the danger of empathy is the subjectivity of its priorities in projection.

But here is the danger of splitting hairs: She will not quite raise an eyebrow, but perhaps halfway flare a nostril, and suggest a thing or three about subjectivity in prioritizing objects of focus, or, in language she and I both would disdain according to the dangers of your and other discourse in these subjects, the subjectivity of target selection. And she would be precisely correct.

Then again, if we wanted to do the demonstrative solidarity bit, we could sit back, say nothing to the misogynists directly, but merely go back and forth 'twixt ourselves, psychoanalyzing the latest typal model reminding that as go variations on themes, desperation really is not so much the father of invention as a not-quite hilarious anthropomorphization of purpose; the homophobes were wrong, for instance, because Y was not about specifically getting into X like we humans do, but, rather, as nature has so aptly demonstrated for millions of years, distributing gamete in general; similarly, albeit figuratively, these aren't quite masculinist inventions proper we witness, but, rather, recombinant sprays of stale impotence.

†​

Good luck on the new adventure, Kittamaru; it's been a rough forty for you, I know, but even rougher for her. And if you're going to get her through what comes next, you're going to need to learn how to address these toxic aspects of self you would rather pretend your way around, and you're going to need to learn how to listen to her, and figure how, when you don't like the news, to not make an utter mess of things for the sake of pride. And don't get me wrong; on this trip, that's precisely human.

But it's really, really important. Good luck.

 

I'm well aware of empathy, Bells... and see, this kind of snide bullshit is what gets you in trouble with others. You presume to know someone when, in reality - you haven't the slightest clue... yet you seem incapable of not going on an offensive tirade.

And so we are back to a fundamental, basic issue - what are you willing to do to enshrine those values you hold so dear into law?

What you are claiming is selling out, others would call 'facing reality'... because lets face it - we don't have perfect candidates and a perfect democracy and a perfect system where everybody gets to stay nice and clean and be all happy and dance around with singing pastel coloured ponies.

Are you willing to get dirty so your children don't have to? Are you willing to fight and cry and sweat and bleed to give them a better future? Because, honestly, a lot of people aren't... so long as they have theirs, they don't give a fuck about anyone else. Scary thing is - a lot of those people are the ones holding office now, propped up by more dirty money than most people will see in a lifetime.

Ah, and back to the attacks and slander... what a shame.

It's kind of funny, actually... you make it sound like I'm some great evil - perhaps it would serve your interests better not to attack and insult those who want the same end goal (a safe world for everybody)? Or, as you say, are the women still speaking, and the rest of us aren't allowed to give our input?

If you want to go it alone, Bells, you certainly can... but you won't make much progress, not the least of all because there are a lot of very powerful people who have no qualms about ruining others to keep their hold on power.







Sympathy... empathy... yeah, trust me, I'm well acquainted. I'd explain, but no doubt it'd simply be twisted and used against me yet again... so no point. Needless to say - if you actually want to discuss something, perhaps you'd have better luck not being an abusive dick about it - for both of ya - cause all it gets is people being dicks right back.

 

if only there were more women like this and men too. it'a amazing there are so many people who don't teach children real moral values and true respect, only what they can or can't get away with according to current law. absolutely apalling and that's why we have the society we do with people who only think in terms of what they can or can't get away with.

 

So the answer, then, is no - you aren't willing to do what it takes to try and forge a better future for the next generation.

Aaaand we're back to the usual Bells train of twisted context and slander. Not sure why I expected different.

Again, Bells - when you want to be an adult, I'm sure this issue will still be around. Have fun being a petulant child on your own - I don't have time to waste with dishonest folks; after all, we have shit like this to try and stop:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/17/tru...ctions-for-workers-objecting-to-abortion.html

So, yeah - I'm willing to say that if we loose this fight, a lot more will be lost than a chance at actual legislative reform regarding sexual assault - we'll be enshrining in law that gender nonconforming folks, non-christians, and women are a lower class of citizen with fewer rights... a rather large step backwards.

But, hey, pick your battles and what not... or don't, and let others do the work for you I guess? I dunno, whatever you want to think Bells (since, ya know, that's what you're going to do regardless).