There is this bizarre idea that metoo means it’s all our job to pick sides when a famous person is involved and shout it across the internet. It’s not.
It’s about believing the receptionist that comes to you as an HR person or supervisor in her company. It’s about believing the student in your class who comes to you about another professor. It’s about believing and helping the family member who comes to you about your family priest.
It’s absolutely not about everyone running onto Twitter and forums to argue and score points for your pre-existing political alliances. This hurts the cause, not help it.
OK but this whole thread is about how the #MeToo movement has basically largely been used as a cynical political tool without any internal consistency!
Of course not and you know it but feel the need to try to score a point pretending it is even though all my points have been generally about famous cases, all famous cases, and not Biden. In fact, I already stated for the record if forced to bet on her claim I would bet it was true.
The whole point is my support for some woman I have never met is explicitly not the point of metoo.
Ok, I mean I just fundamentally disagree that MeToo only extends to people you personally know. Certainly nobody was saying that about Kav’s victim or the Weinstein victims or the women that Louis CK jerked off in front of.
As I’ve pointed out it isn’t lost that the “two sides” here fall almost perfectly in line with our collective pre-exiting political biases. If there was a more random distribution I would be more confident this had anything to do with actual metoo and not just another tool to bludgeon the other side.
A separate and useful discussion would be around the tendency to believe men.
I don’t think it’s only about people we know. I just think it’s a net harm to women that 99.9% of the discussion around sexual abuse focuses on famous cases.
Clovis is making some very good points and appears to be a voice of reason and restraint (what a concept!). I will comment on one aspect of his posting.
Discussing “famous” cases is a vehicle for people to examine their own views/biases/preconceptions, etc., and a vehicle to have a shared discussion. That is one way for people to “grow”, to “learn”, to “change”, to “listen”, etc.
It is difficult to have the same type of discussion/examination/learning if I bring up a case involving my workmate Janet who nobody else has ever heard of. And the information would necessarily be coming from just one source (me) with all the inherent pitfalls.
Good points. No doubt these cases are the ones which attract the attention and should be used to teach. I just wish there wasn’t that aforementioned almost perfect alignment with pre-existing political alliances.
I’d settle for people doing some serious self examination (myself included) when we discuss these to ensure we are not reflexively joining our team and that our true intention is advocating for victims and not scoring points against people we don’t like.
It would be nice to see more “I support her and hope she gets support and a fair audience with the powers that be” and less “ lol of course X is a rapist. He is a conservative after all”.
I’m not trying to score points. I’m trying to say you saying someone is pretending to care is unfair. If I’m misreading something, which happens, my fault.
I did. That’s my opinion that I have expressed in detail in several posts itt with my evidence and rationale. I made the exact same claim about the side saying she is lying.
My point, which has been stated many times already, is that it’s not that you don’t care about Reade or sexual assault, in the generic sense. Of course you do. Everything I know about you says you are a good person. I just think in this debate you REALLY care about scoring points against LIBERALS! and any thoughts of Reade are secondary. I was using a rhetorical device to make this point.