Shit post. There are 6 items on the list, none longer than 16 words. If you’re too lazy to read the post it’s entirely your fault.
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Sry. Not being a lawyer I’m not used to this level of absurd sophistry.
wtf?
That’s sophistry and burying it? You stopped reading at “poor person”? Why? You were so outraged that he brought class into it that you couldn’t read one more word?
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My personal favorite example of lawyer sophistry is when Disney made sure we knew that Aladdin was a poor street rat before Abu steals the loaf of bread.
Let the monkey’s deceitful conduct stand on its own, Eisner. Utterly dishonest movie.
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C’mon. The issue is absolutely that women get assaulted and then not believed; the issue isn’t that there is a rash of men being falsely accused of sexual assault. However, there are cases where men are falsely accused like the Duke Lacrosse team. I thought Tara Reade was a fabulist who made the story up when reading news accounts at the time. After reading this thread I realize I may have come to that conclusion because I prefer that to Biden being an assaulter.
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I mean it very well could be that she’s making it up. That is almost always going to be a possibility in cases like this. If so, it’s a deeply unfair thing for Biden to have to go through.
But like, the inherent uncertainty in these things has always been used by powerful men to discredit the accusations, and as a result those men rarely if ever faced consequences. We had a minor epiphany as a society after a lot of hard work and bravery from female activists, and at least some of us agreed that the default position is to believe the woman who comes forward - both because false accusations are exceedingly rare, and because the harm caused to victims by taking the “well, I need to see some proof before I believe you” is hard to even comprehend.
Tara Reade didn’t get anything from these accusations, as far as I can tell, and has had her name and life dragged through mud. A bunch of people want to pretend that how they treat her is different than republicans dragging Christine Blasey Ford or the Clinton machine dragging his many accusers, but it’s not. In the end it all boils down to “well, we can’t prove it one way or another, and she’s no angel”.
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You would do yourself a pretty big favour if you’d learn to just take a fucking L now and then, man. Like this is among the smallest deals possible and you’re fighting it tooth and nail. Let it go.
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I’m going to preface this by saying, I don’t really think her perjury has much of anything to do with the credibility of her sexual assault account. That being said, iirc, you’re an attorney and to pretend like your summary:
“ * Is a poor person who lied about her credentials to make money, and not conventionally attractive””
Is an accurate description of what she did is pretty embarrassing. This statement makes it sound like she lied about her gpa or a minor she didn’t take to get a shot at being a waitress or something where it is irrelevant to her job anyway and will never come up again. She lied about her degree as an expert witness in criminal court! The basis of her testimony relied on her credentials, and they would have been questioned every time she was put on the stand, and she was called to testify multiple times. Each time she would have lied about her degree, under oath, in front of a jury, and then given testimony based on those lies to convict someone of a crime. Then, evidently, she also lied about random things that were inconsequential, like she denied taking the bar exam. So, no I think it’s pretty clear that it’s wrong to characterize this as innocently as a poor person just trying to make a buck. So maybe y’all should tone down your indignation at Trolly.
As others are pointing out, you and others would fucking crucify this woman for helping the cops by lying in this way, but for the fact that you need to dress her up a bit more because it helps your attack on the libs. I don’t mean this as a personal attack, but hopefully it can help everyone to disarm a bit and maybe realize that none of us can claim the righteous outrage we so often like to adopt around here.
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Thanks for the tip!
I mean I guess you can keep banging on about the like Jesuitical casuistry of having mentioned the thing you said he didn’t mention and see how that look wears. I’m telling you, though — not good!
Understood.
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If it doesn’t have anything to do with her sexual assault allegations, I’m not sure why I needed to go into more detail.
The stories are pretty scant on details, so I’m not sure what specialized field she claimed to be an expert in. The stories I’ve read say that her lies were claiming she graduated with a BA and had a visiting prof gig, when in reality it sounds like she had the credits to graduate but never formally received her degree and she did student-facing admin work that she describes as “affiliate faculty online as needed to help students with life learning and BA completion.”
I have no idea what kind of “expertise” any of that would bestow on her. Reading between the lines it kind of sounds like she was a victim witness advocate or something, but they usually don’t testify. She was paid ~600 bucks per court appearance and did it 12 times.
All of which is to say I don’t see anything wrong with how I framed it. She lied in court multiple times. She almost certainly did it to make some extra money. It is of course wrong to lie in court, and especially wrong to do it on behalf of the prosecution.
If the only reason we were talking about her was the expert witness stuff, yeah obviously the take would be “that’s a really shitty thing to do, she should be punished and possibly the prosecutors should be sanctioned”. But the reason we’re talking about it is as an attempt to discredit her sexual assault allegations against the president elect, and so the appropriate context is the one you started your post with: when a woman alleges sexual assault, you don’t get to say “ah, but you’ve lied before!” as a defense. It’s stupid. It’s an intentional distraction.
Somehow everyone ITT can see that when conservatives point out that Michael Brown robbed a convenience store right before the cop killed him, but not when libs point out that Tara Reade lied in court 15 years after she told her friends that Biden assaulted her.
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Also the prosecutor decided not to file charges against Reade,
A press release issued Thursday, Nov. 19, by District Attorney Jeannine Pacioni states that her office will not file perjury charges "because of the difficulty in proving the materiality of her false testimony.
“Materiality requires proving beyond a reasonable doubt in a new trial that Ms. Reade’s false testimony in other trials probably would have influenced the outcomes in those trials,” the statement reads. “This inquiry depends on the facts and strength of the old cases, which would require again presenting these cases in a new perjury trial.”
I think you could probably go farther than that and say that people with “bad reputations” are more likely to be targeted by predators because they lack credibility.
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I think thats fair but it also commonly twisted around by people who want to reach a certain conclusion and work backwards until they find a justification. I mean, a lot of people lie about a lot of things.
I’m sure one of the characteristics of people who assault police officers is that they’ve committed other crimes in the past. We still shouldn’t use someone’s criminal record as a basis to believe the police officer when they claim they had a justified shooting.
It’s funny, actually - if this went to trial and Reade had video recordings of Biden assaulting other women, she wouldn’t be able to offer them as evidence that he did the same thing to her. She wouldn’t even be able to ask Biden on the stand if he denies assaulting the other women. You’re not allowed to use prior “bad acts” to prove that someone acted the same way in this instance. But evidence that Reade (or Biden, of course) has lied before is always admissible because it “goes to the credibility of the witness”. I haven’t looked into it at all, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that jurisprudence has some unsavory history behind it.
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Why is it important any of us have an opinion on the allegations at this point? The election is over. You either did or didn’t vote for Biden.
This whole discussion serves only to score points in the internet game and has nothing to do with metoo. If anything, this type of debate is part of the reason it is so difficult for women to report when the abuser is a famous person because we all are so happy to join the noise.
Did you feel the same way about Trump’s sexual assault allegations after he was elected?