by Scott Ragsdale
Part 1 – You Can Kill the Messenger.
“What a message to send to the world. “If you are powerful and entitled, just shout loud enough and you will seem genuine. Show enough contempt for due process and you will be rewarded for standing firm. Harangue lawmakers and you will be fawned over and your nomination fast-tracked.” Sasha Abramsky, UC Davis Instructor and author of “Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream.” (Sacramento Bee, California Forum 1D October 7, 2018).
By the narrowest margin possible Kavanaugh was forced through by the Senate’s slimmest majority. There was never any intention to seek consensus. The ideology that controls the Republican party has made it clear that they don’t intend to lead through consensus or even by democratic majority. They are “all-in” on “strong man” authoritarianism.
The choice to infect the court reveals the far right’s ideological desperation and hubris. Those in the Senate majority know that Kavanaugh greatly improves their chances of walking away from indictments that will be made against the administration and Congress. These indictments will come because the majority will no longer be Republicans in the House and Senate. Such will be the success of this midterm election and if not entirely this election than future elections.
In her statement, Christine Blasey-Ford said she was reluctant to even notify her federal government of Kavanaghs’ assault. “It seemed like it (his appointment) was inevitable.” An emerging pattern of abusive behavior not was enough to dissuade the Senate majority from seeking an alternative. With misplaced conviction, the Republican leadership has vanquished the Court and the confidence of 
a generation of women and the men who love them. Ford’s lawyers on Friday denounced the Senate and the FBI probe, calling the inquiry “not a meaningful investigation in any sense of the word. (Carla Herreria POLITICS 10/06/2018)
Christine stood up for human dignity and we all owe her our gratitude for doing so. Her effort will not be in vain. Her presence exposed the Senate majority’s false pretense to represent all Americans. Instead they made a display of ignoring a majority of Americans. Human rights have been for some time more universally applied outside of the United States than in it. This fact is now squarely before the public. The extreme right in power will now try to use the national bench to end the livelihood and lives of those that insist on a living wage and self-determination, who are black or brown or female or lbgtq or a who strives to live as a zero-footprint species.
Validating a Tragedy
We the violated will continue to insist on our dignity and place in society by building a culture of showing up and regular participation by all. At the same time, there is a need to recognize harm when harm is done. I am in mourning and while in mourning I want to show my solidarity and respect for the women in my life. We shed tears together as my heart and the hearts of the majority of the nation have been broken.
To the women in my life, those in my home, those I swim with, those in yoga class, those I danced with and those that I have worked and work with now – I don’t expect you to be holding back anything – not a thing to curb your legitimate despair. Invite yourselves to express it entirely and without boundaries at least until the body requires you to return to make the most of your conscious gift of life in other ways. If you do place your grief away – for now – we are here if you choose to share it in the future – to validate your hurt and the hurt in others and take the time to be in the pain with community. I am and I will.
Scott Ragsdale is a Davis resident and the former general manager of Davis Roots, the business accelerator fostering economic development in Davis.
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Obviously the writer of this piece hasn’t looked at the polls lately. The Kavanaugh smear campaign has invigorated the GOP and has swung moderates into voting for Republicans next month. The Dem Senator’s actions and those of the mob outside has shown America how unhinged the left has become. It all backfired on Democrats.
Was consensus ever alive? I must have missed that time.
Just like the crazy right wingers were wrong when they said Obama would ban the Christian faith and the crazy Left wingers were wrong when they said Trump would ban abortions, they are wrong when they say Kavanaugh is going to ban abortions.
P.S. I bet there are more gay republicans than Catholic attorneys in their 50’s that want to ban abortions (and the number of Catholic attorneys that worked for and were recommended by pro choice judges is even lower)…
Guess we will see. To me one set of statements is more plausible than the other
“crazy Left wingers were wrong when they said Trump would ban abortions, they are wrong when they say Kavanaugh is going to ban abortions.”
This is not crazy if you analyze by state. If Roe is overturned, the question of abortion goes back to the states. Some states such as California will doubtless keep abortion safe and legal. There are currently 22 states poised to enact laws making abortion illegal ( with various exemptions). In those states which enact a ban, it will be defacto as though Trump/Kavanaugh had banned abortion. So much for “crazy”.
“Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh” has a nice ring to it.
Sounds like Keith is white male….
P.S. My left of center friends were hoping to get the first trans woman of color on the court…
Then your left of center friends need to win elections.
Who said it?
“Elections have consequences.”
Another chicken that came home to roost.
All of you that are upset about this need to look no farther than your own party’s Harry Reid who invoked the 50 vote rule to push through judges under Obama which led to McConnell doing the same. The chickens have come home to roost.
You had better hope Ginsburg hangs in there.
I don’t have a problem with the majority ruling
Her story with all its holes resembles a slice of Swiss cheese.
Here’s some facts about Chrisitne Ford that you all probably won’t find posted in the biased mainstream media:
Perhaps you won’t find these “facts” in mainstream media because they’re BS. Psychologists employed by a university are exempt from licensure, for example.
I don’t think it matters whether or not you believe Dr. Ford’s story. I believe Judge Kavanaugh’s own criteria for who should be a judge.
In his own ( paraphrased minimally) words: “A judge must be open minded, unbiased, and non partisan.”
At this confirmation hearing he made it absolutely obvious that he is none of the above. By his own words and his demonstrated temperament, he is not fit to be on the Supreme Court.
It did no such thing.
It was a human response to the forces that were attacking him personally. He was defending himself and his family at that point. If the questions and challenges of the committee had all been on his record and performance as a jurist and he responded similarly I would agree with you. But it became personal not of his choosing.
The hypocrisy of the left is as thick as the mud in a pig pen after a rain. They weaponize speech… justifying the rage of those triggered by accusations they deem unfounded and unfair. Yet here is a man that the left was attempting to destroy with unfounded, unsubstantiated and likely untrue personal attacks only for a political agenda, and the left then claims he is unfit for responding with more restraint than any triggered person fitting into a sanctioned victim group.
There is so much intellectual dishonesty coming out of the Democrats and their supporters. And there are copious raging double-standards.
Kavanaugh’s qualifications and record as a judge were ignored because they were politically inconvenient. The desperate Democrats went deep into their bag of dirty tricks (Nancy Pelosi admitted it).
I believe Dr. Ford is a liar. I think she was a paid hit woman for the cause, and I think the evidence of this will be uncovered.
It was a show put on for Trump so he wouldn’t withdraw the nomination. In times of extreme stress, people often drop their facade and reveal their true selves. At his second hearing, Kavanaugh showed he has neither the temperament nor the objectivity to be a Supreme Court Justice. He was and is a partisan hack.
There is much more evidence that Dr. Ford is the partisan hack. There is nothing in all of Kavanaugh’s history to back you claim. However, Ford is a known liberal activist. Her attorney was/is a known anti-Kavanaugh activist. The entire episode has copious fingerprints as a political hit job.
Kavanaugh wrote an opinion piece in the WSJ where he admitted mistakes having lost his cool. But normal and reasonable people understand it as a normal and reasonable human response given the circumstances. And normal and reasonable people want real human’s on the bench.
Trump was not going to withdraw the nomination unless Kavanaugh quit.
Kavanaugh’s speech was epic. He put the Democrat Senators who had been maligning him in their place. His speech will go down as one of the greatest ever, right along with Senator Lindsey Graham’s speech.
“it became personal not of his choosing.”
The same kind of attack was certainly of his choosing when he was advocating for eliciting in public all the lurid details of Bill Clinton’s consensual affair with Lewinski regardless of the negative effects that might have on HRC and Chelsea. Now he is full of righteous indignation ( after days of coaching at the WH) that the Dems had the audacity to use the playbook that he helped write.
Talk about hypocrisy.
Tia, the big difference is when Billy did his deed there was proof, remember the blue dress. Plus Billy perjured himself. There’s absolutely no proof Kavanaugh has done anything wrong.
The consensus around the choosing of a Jurist had been different as you know it required 60 votes to get past filibuster. That was blown up by the radical right that has a maligned grip on the Republican Party. I don’t identify this a as a political party problem.
Backfired? I’d rather fight that switch – we on the “radical left,” otherwise known as people with a reasonable amount of empathy and the will to act on it, know that the levers of government are not going our way. No surprise. We are not about to be deterred by impressions of those that hope to keep authoritarian mostly white privilege in disproportionate power – plurality or bust.
It’s hard to know what the polls mean as the lens that the pollsters and the media that reports the news are motivated to exaggerate nuances. We shall see after the voting on November 6th. The only hope for the radical right is voter suppression.
What Kavanaugh will or won’t do is not the point. The process has shown itself to be irreconcilably broken to not have vetted the abuse allegations entirely. The jurist is not the best person for the job.
The far right is most interested in power for their minority than anything else. Should we yield? No!
No, that was blown up by Harry Reid, last time I looked he was hardly the radical right. McConnell just threw Reid’s rule back at the Democrats.
You seem to use all the leftist talking points even though they’re not true.
After 7 FBI investigations you lefties are still not satisfied. The only thing you will accept is an investigation that villifies Kavanaugh. That’s not how it works. I think what we really need is a full investigation into Miss Ford. More and more is being discovered as her story is being flushed out by some in the press.
“After 7 FBI investigations you lefties are still not satisfied. ”
Given who they didn’t talk to, it’s hard to be confused as to why that would be the case. It is what it is. The right sold it’s soul to Trump and they further sold their soul to get Kavanaugh as opposed to someone who would have been equally conservative. Time will tell whether it was the right move.
The left sold their soul to Miss Ford and the other fake allegations and looked bad in doing so. Their whole plan was to delay the seating of a judge in hopes of winning the midterms and therefor blocking Trump from ever seating another justice.
You are not familiar with Fortas, Bork, or Miers?
“in hopes of winning the midterms and therefor blocking Trump from ever seating another justice.”
And you seem to have forgotten Garland.
It seems obvious from the back and forth that both sides want to blame the other primary while both sides have been culpable at times. Judge Kavanaugh expressed clearly what neither side wants to admit.
A judge is supposed to be non partisan. We have had some truly centrist judges. Merrick Garland would have likely been just that had the GOP not decided to engage in this particular round of court packing.
I have not forgotten Garland. All this is just par for the course.
This really frosts me.
Garland was an uber liberal that the Democrats were attempting to replace uber conservative Scalia. The Biden Rule was in play biggly as look at who was elected. If Crooked Hillary was elected, then Dems would have got a more liberal justice (probably not as liberal as Garland, but less conservative than Kavanaugh).
But Gorsuch was a good-fit replacement for Scalia.
And Kavanaugh is a good-fit replacement for Kennedy. Kennedy RECOMMENDED Kavanaugh.
Dems are crying about their missed opportunity to stack the courts stronger liberal. But at this point the court is ideologically consistent to how it has been for the last 20 years in terms of the liberal-conservative ideological mix.
I think the risk here is that the Democrats have motivated a lesser blue wave next month and maybe even a red wave… and then if Ginsburg does not last until 2020… or if she does and Trump is re-elected… well, as they say, then you will REALLY have something to rage and cry about related to the tilt of the court.
Tell that to Ginsburg, Kagan, Sotomayor and Breyer.
“Garland was an uber liberal” Garland was not an Uber Liberal and was attacked from the left for being too white, male and centrist.
Garland was as far left as Obama’s administration thought they may have a chance getting through.
Jim – it is a myth that Garland was/is a moderate.
https://www.google.com/search?q=judicial+common+space+score+garland&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi8ppLd0vfdAhWTInwKHR1wBz8QsAR6BAgAEAE&biw=1920&bih=916#imgrc=qYs_lz_lOvuSAM:
Did I say “moderate”?
Nope – Sorry. I wan’t correcting you, I was agreeing with you.
“I was agreeing with you.”
Nobody else ever does. Maybe there is something wrong with you.
I look forward to Jeff M’s arguing that only an uber-liberal will be a good fit to replace Justice Ginsburg when she retires. But I’m not holding my breath. Consistency is not the right’s strong suit.
Just as a liberal President, like Obama, replaced justices with liberal justices. Elections have consequences.
I agree that a selection to replace Ginsburg would be better if liberal or left of cetner. I want five conservative leaning justices because they will be strict constitutionalists and four progressive judges. I think that is the right balance for the country. The problem is that the left stopped putting left-of-center judges on the bench and instead we have people with the opinion that activism on the bench is fine … and thus we have a wide partisan divide on many critical issues that come before the court not because the conservatives on the court have gone more right, but because the liberals have gone more left.
Center-right governance is the right mix for this country.
I disagree Jeff, when Ginsberg decides to give it up, hopefully under Trump, I want another young conservative judge seated so the SCOTUS stays conservative for a very long time.
Darwinism.
I believe that conservatives will get fat dumb and lazy (figuratively and actually) if they become too much of a dominate ideology in control. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Just look at California for example.
I want a balance with the tilt going center-right so that both parties stay on their toes listening to the voters and responding to the voter’s needs… but I see the left as under-developed in their ideas, their civility and their morals.
For me it is the type of REAL diversity that I desire… diversity of ideas that collide and get debated and get factored into the final outcomes.
We have become too tribally aligned with our politics like they are sports teams must win. I blame the political left and the left media for most of this as they have seemingly adopted their politics to fill their gaping hole of lacking spirituality. That is why I see the need for conservatives to be in the majority control for the country… the left are the REAL religious fanatics that would burn the place down in the name of their faith. Frankly conservatives have more of their s— together… demonstrate more self-control. Just look at how the GOP handled the Kavanaugh debacle… they were the adults in the room. We simply cannot let the children rule. But they should have a seat or two at the table and we should be forced to listen to them… just like we treat our own kids.
My opinion.
This is so ridiculous that I don’t know where to begin.
The political left in this country has lost control of their mental facility and are struck in a giant raging temper tantrum built over their strong emotional response to feelings of loss… feelings that are misplaced as the expectation for what was won was always false.
The 9-11 terrorists and the idiocy of prior administrations combined to push moderates to their own giant raging temper tantrum beginning with the election of 2008 and that resulted in eight years of Obama, Pelosi and Reid. However, the giddy feeling of winning that the establishment Democrats and leftists developed during that time was not to be permanent. The US was not yet going down the rat-hole of the liberal global order. Voters began to recognize their giant mistake and corrected it in 2016.
Kavanaugh just reminds them of loss again. They lost the Presidency, they lost the House, they lost the Senate, they lost 70% of the Governorships and 60% of the state legislatures. And now, they feel, they are losing the Supreme Court.
But these are not really losses because there were really never any wins. Gorsuch replaces Scalia. Kavanaugh replaces Kennedy. Kavanaugh clerked for Scalila and Kennedy. He is a clone. Nothing changes.
What we are seeing is a failure of the left to accept reality… a reality that the US is still a mostly conservative country rejecting European socialism, and more importantly, rejecting the idiocy of a liberal global order.
#MeToo is just a Soros-funded, left-media supported end-around to try and recapture ground believed lost. However, it backfired to launch a #WalkAway movement that is gaining that ground and more.
Interesting. I would think clones of Kennedy would be very different from clones of Scalia in how they would vote. Nobody ever accused Scalia of being a ‘centrist’ or a ‘swing vote’.
Average the two.
To give him the benefit of the doubt, I’m willing to concede that Kavanaugh is a recovering sexual predator, which is more than I can say for the Predator in Chief who occupies the White House.
What the far right, including our own Keith O, refers to disdainfully as the mob is actually democracy in action. Those who claim the left is unhinged have apparently never seen one of Trump’s rallies, including the recent one in which supporters cheered his mocking of Christine Blasey Ford.
It remains to be seen if the recent polling showing an increase in GOP enthusiasm for the midterms will maintain or if it is a temporary high from the latest McConnell abuse of power (Merrick Garland). It’s a long way to November 6th and Trump still has access to Twitter.
Proof please. And not someone who makes a claim of an unfounded, uncorroborated supposed occurance that happened 36 years ago, where the accuser can’t remember the date, the location, how she got there, how she got home, her four witnesses all won’t back her claims, even one who was her good friend? Though she couldn’t remember scheeet she somehow remembered she only had one beer that night 36 years ago? Come on, something smells fishy about her whole story.
And as a lawyer I think you know one is innocent until proven guilty. So show us the proof.
Keith… isn’t it a crackup that Eric and other liberals on this blog have decided to use the label “far right” for anyone that disagrees with their views?
Try this out next time you are out walking with a friend. Take a sharp left turn and keep going for several hundred yards and then look back and your friend will appear to have drifted far right.
Jeff, it’s also funny that Eric hasn’t responded to my post being that he conceded that Kavanaugh is a “recovering sexual predator” without any proof.
Maybe Eric had been reading the emails floating that say that say that writer Paul Brickman based his screenplay for the movie Risky Business from a short story by Mark Judge called “Risky Times With O’Kavanaugh” about how two Catholic School pals would put quaaludes in the punch and have “rape parties” with rich underage private school girls (and college age girls like Julie Swetnick who went to about ten of the parties) when their parents were out of town that ends when a Yale admission guy wakes up in the party house the next day and says “Yale needs a guy like Bart O’Kavanaugh”…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risky_Business
“And as a lawyer I think you know one is innocent until proven guilty. So show us the proof.”
As a lawyer, I am sure you are aware that “innocent until proven guilty” is a legal construct for a court of law and not applicable to a job interview. During my time on our hiring team, the suggestion of a sexual assault would have triggered either a thorough investigation or more likely a call for the next candidate. Shouting at, not answering questions, and disrespecting members of the hiring team, or making a crass partisan statement like “what goes around comes around” would have resulted in an automatic rejection.
I would like any businessman to tell me they would hire an individual who came in and treated members of the hiring team that way….honestly.
Tia, would your hiring team have maligned a job applicant the way the Democrats on the Senate hiring team maligned Kavanaugh before his “job interview”?
It is interesting that when I called someone a “murderer” I was admonished by David that the person in question was not convicted of murder by a jury.
I guess that standard is “flexible” on the vanguard
[moderator: yes, looser standards for this thread today]
Yes, looser standards when a conservative is being convicted without a trial.
Neither Keith nor Jim seems capable of understanding the distinction between the standards for a criminal conviction and the standard applied to someone seeking a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. The fundamental right to liberty is at stake in the former case. There is no fundamental right to a seat on the Supreme Court.
Eric seems incapable of understanding that the point raised by David was that one should not call someone a criminal unless they had been convicted of a crime. Or did you think I was going to incarcerate them in my home jail?
criminal
1) n. a popular term for anyone who has committed a crime, whether convicted of the offense or not. More properly it should apply only to those actually convicted of a crime.
I would just like to point out that I have never heard of a murderer being considered for a lifetime position on the Supreme Court, although, I guess anything is possible with the current GOP who were willing to seat Gianforte after he physically attacked a journalist for the sin of doing his job.
So, are we talking “Animal Farm”, where all animals, or nature of comments, are equal but some are more equal than others?
Ok…
[moderator: no.]
So, since the standards are looser on this thread, I suggest that ‘righties’ “beat off/masturbate with their right hand” and ‘lefties’ do so with their left.
OK.
The die is cast. Decision made. But absent an impeachment vote, I see not why this matter, matters.
Y’all enjoy your self-gratification…
Then why are you bothering to post here Howard?
Back at ‘ya’… why are you bothering to post? Same-same… but I’m not a rabid ideologue…
[moderator: calling other Vanguard participants names is still verboten.]
There’s something disingenuous regarding posting something, for the sole purpose of calling other people names (on either/both sides of an issue). Thereby positioning oneself as a “moderate voice of reason”, I guess.
Having said that, I would agree that none of this really matters, since it was/is totally outside of local control (and is already a “done deal”, as noted). Sometimes interesting to read, just to see what others are thinking.
Ron, I’ve got news for you, about 99.9% of what is written on this site doesn’t really matter.
As for Howard, he doesn’t want to post on this subject because he says it doesn’t matter except yet he shows up and posts on this matter. Go figure…..
True. I still can’t figure out why we do it! (Seems like most of the motivation derives from pointing out the one-sided nature and/or incomplete information regarding most of the articles. And then, it takes off from there.)
But, all of my comments are probably within the other (.1%) that you referred to. 🙂
What about those of us in the middle? Are you providing services?
LMAO
My perspective of the Ford claims against Kavanaugh can be summarized by an analogy that his babysitter claimed that he exposed himself after a bath, and attempted to grab her breast when she was changing his diaper.
Change the Ford story just a bit and it changes it a lot with respect to the #MeToo outrage.
It is feasible to conclude went to the party as a 15 year old girl looking to attract and seduce 17 year old boys. Anybody that wants to claim this is unusual behavior for a 15 year old girl attending parties where there is drinking is either in denial or an uninformed dip.
What if she was a willing participant and the hand over the mouth was in play to stop the giggling of two young people enjoying some heavy petting?
What if she is afflicted with false memory syndrome… playing the event over and over in her head for 35 years and rewriting it?
I just remembered that while playing in a rock and roll dance band in my young twenties, at a big fraternity and/or sorority party (I cannot remember which) I was groped several times in the crotch by two drunk girls while I was singing. My band mates were cracking up as I was putting moves to keep them past arm’s length while I sang. At the song break I went to talk to them and said “please don’t do that”. They said “ok, but we were just having fun.”
I had completely forgotten about this as just one of many hormonal encounters I had with the opposite sex when I was young and single. I am not traumatized. Why would I be if I am otherwise emotionally and psychologically stable?
Thinking about the reverse… a female singer being groped in the crotch by a couple of boys dancing and “just having fun”.
It makes me consider that either we need to admit that women and men are not equal and will never be with respect to sexuality, or that something is broken with respect to female expectations for what is sexual assault, harassment, etc., and what is normal playful human behavior that is fired by natural human hormones.
Now I anticipate a rage-filled hyperbolic response on this post that I am sanctioning sexual assault. I am not. I have women in my life that if sexually assaulted by anyone I would likely lose my self-control and seek them out for severe punishment. My point is the line we are drawing with all these women claiming #MeToo. It seems we are taking it way too far. 80% of the claims apparently involve alcohol, an interest in being with the opposite sex and to have fun… from the females as well as the males. Just go to Youtube and click on videos of Spring Break.
“It seems we are taking it way too far”
You are almost certainly correct. From your perspective as an older white man. From my point of view, having had many unwanted sexual advances which I did not report for various reasons at various times in my life starting at age 13, and having had hundreds of women tell me their stories for the first time, sometimes decades later, we are not taking it nearly far enough. When there are no longer stacks of unprocessed rape kits, when no woman is ever expelled from her own family for an allegation of sexual assault, when one ever hides abuse by her father or stepfather from her mother, maybe we will have gone “far enough”.
Or too far like the Duke lacrosse case or Tawana Brawley? It happens…..
It’s probably important to note that you are pointing our fairly rare exceptions.
If a 53 year old man was to admit that when he was 16 he was having beers with a 15 year old girl and touched her without first asking permission and she rejected him I’m wondering what Tia thinks we should do:
1. Send the guy to prison for the rest of his life.
2. Give him a hard time for hitting on a rich private school girl when even most nerdy Catholic school boys in the early 80’s knew that if you wanted some action you should hit on a public school girl that lived with a single mom and smoked cigarettes (or cloves)…
3. Prohibit the guy from working.
4. Prohibit the guy from working as a judge.
What a vile, despicable question. Christine Blasey Ford was not “touched.” This was an attempted rape. What we should do, at a minimum, is not promote him to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court.
I am impressed that Eric knows exactly what the guy in the room with one (or three) other guys in 1981 (or the mid 80’s) was planning to do to Miss Blasey after he touched her without permission.
P.S. I’m wondering if Eric will estimate the percentage of 16 year old boys that attended exclusive Catholic prep schools in the 80’s that raped girls from neighboring even more exclusive prep schools that knew both their first and last names (making it easy for their Dad’s to give the name to a mobster to beat them with a lead pipe until they could never walk again).
P.P.S. I’m also wondering if Eric thinks that supreme court justice Neil Gorsuch (who was at Georgetown Prep with justice Kavanaugh in the fall of 1981) raped any prep school girls (or went to any of the “rape parties”) before heading off to Columbia and Harvard-Law…
Sexist, ageist and racist all in one fragment. Nice!
What are those and why are they persecutable? Are they advances from people considered unattractive? Are they advances made at a wrong time? Are they done awarkedly or crudely… and if they had been done differently would they have been wanted or tolerated? Are all sexual advances unwanted, or only certain ones? Is it different than flirting, or the same? Can someone explain that difference?
Are only liberal women making this case? I don’t know many conservative women that claim to have some historical trauma of sexual harrassment from unwanted advances.
I know happily married couples where one persistent party won the other over after initial rejection. Are we saying no more now? Once she says no or gives that clear look of rejection, the next advance is considered sexual harassment? Or maybe the guy should just know better before he asks… like she is out of his league and he should know.
Having had a long corporate career working with thousands of men and women, the observed or known incidents of what I consider real sexual harassment I can count on one hand. There was flirting and banter… there was some misbehavior at after work events where alcohol was served. But I am still friends with many of those people and nobody has complained of being traumatized by anything from those times.
Really, sometimes I think we have been invaded by aliens that live a completely different life than do the regular people.
This video may clear things up for Jeff (it ends with the three ways for guys to avoid sexual harassment problems at work):
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/tv-funhouse-sexual-harassment-and-you/2751966
Ha! Yes, familiar with this great training video. I think it is accurate.
It’s so nice not to be aligned with a party or political “side”.
I can just sit back and laugh at all of you.
Alan, just think, this was only Part 1. You still have a Part 2 to get all excited about. Maybe tomorrow.
Sit back and get some popcorn.
Jeff M consider this again. Please take time to listen to the women who are in your life again. Your statement belitles women, men and non-binary personal dignity. There is a reason male outrage is allowed to be seen appropriate and female outrage is , by some, seen as ok to label hysteric and somehow delusional. This is unconsionable. We are making a choice about how to handle each other and I would suggest that men, in most cases – myself included – have much more distance to go.
The goal is to learn how to find our better selves by finding true masculinity in the support of other voices and thereby experience the benefits of a society that may not always get it right, but continues to struggle to do so in the spirit of human equity in all affairs.
The support of an emotionally inept (dangerously emotionally damaged) Administration relies, in part, on the sophomoric “Lord of the Flies” enthusiasm that revels in the denigration of the other. At some point we who are not boys any longer need to truly man-up and do our part to stop to the mistreatment of women or any “other” that can all to easily become targets of adolescent illusions of omnipotence. That is, in part, the job of society, but I think you (Jeff) would agree that the tutoring of this aspect male development might fall on us grown male role models. That is something which we can agree on and improve on.
Kavanaugh and the system of thinking the led him to he Court has a serious and systemic lack of regard for holding men (and white men in particular) passions within due bounds. It is the same thinking the leads to abuses of the use of force by police and to the unnecessary destruction of our environment. We need not accept this abusive thinking any longer. There is no wisdom in it. It hurts the all involved.
Thank goodness the voices of women are calling us to task. The outrage by our female persons, and all of our persons who have been discounted as other, are entirely justified.
The placement of a male who failed to find appropriate boundaries for his expression of masculinity and claims amnesia is more than a poor choice, it is a dangerous choice. It is a choice, along with several instances of questionable testimony, that has been made at the expense of the integrity of the Court.
The Kavanaugh confirmation is not the first nor will be the last outrage that this Administration will inflict upon us for as long as it has power to do so. What has happened to the Court is tragic, but we should consider other tragedies that stem from this sophomoric abusive mindset. It is also alarming that the US aids Saudi bombings that have killed tens of thousands of Yemenis.
We are able to change the course of events and we must do so. Regarding our judicial system, the events leading to confirmation are a series of abuses of power. They can not be disregarded. It points to the necessity of permanently reshaping the expression of power in this country. And that’s exactly what we will do.
I am all about equality Scott. I expect the same strength of character from all women as I do for men. I will not support of anything lacking reason just because it is vogue. I will not be pulled into virtual signaling and victimology… mostly because I know these are things that result in terrible results people claimed as victims in the long run. I care about any female that is truly sexually assaulted. I care about any many that is falsely accused. Lastly, I care about a society being made sterile and weird as it relates to human sexuality. The Kavanaugh confirmation was just another crucible of anti-Trump rage and Trump derangement syndrome that the language in your post confirms you are afflicted with. There is so much false alarmism and hyperbole in your words, I think, if you are not already, you should pursue a career in writing novels.
And lastly, when social issues are politicized the messaging around them can no longer be trusted.