Dion met René Angélil when she was 12, yes, but they did not begin dating until she was 19.
They became engaged when she was 23, married when she was 25 (and he was 51), and will celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary this year.
Frankly, there seems to be very little grist for complaint; one might speculate that a woman of nineteen was romantically, in maturity, and in life successes outmatched by a man 26 years older than she…but when the same woman is now 45 years old and an internationally famous singing sensation with a half-billion dollar perfume line as a side hobby, it seems unlikely that this speculation holds any water at all. By most accounts, the two remain blissfully in love.
The whole “How do we define ‘paedophile’?” angle is a red herring. The main point here is that if you’ve built a reputation for defending inappropriate sexual behaviour by older men with tortuous logic and strained arguments in at least one prior thread, you don’t go back to the well by doing it again in another thread. Unless you feel OK about solidifying that reputation further, that is.
If you keep defending creeps, you’ll be perceived as a creep yourself, and rightly so.
Woody Allen’s behaviour with Soon-Yi was perfectly legal. It also crossed social taboos, and that’s the point. Being a creep transcends legal definitions of appropriate behaviour–it’s a social judgement, not a legal charge.
It should never be considered creepy to tell the truth. I find the notion that one should keep exculpatory evidence to himself and deliberately allow factually false assertions to go unchallenged if the assertions themselves are creepy to be far more creepy - and dangerous - than anything I’ve done by far. And people whose reaction to true facts about a supposedly or genuinely creepy person by accusing the person with the facts of the same criminal or creepy attitudes, are the worst and most dangerous of all. I can assure I couldn’t care less about my reputation amongst either group. Besides, I could never look myself in the mirror if I were ever to engage in such a cowardly practice as you suggest.
The point is that by fixating on the technicalities (e.g. Soon-Yi was an adult) you’re actually missing the meat of the discussion. It doesn’t really make Allen’s behaviour acceptable from a societal POV just because Soon-Yi wasn’t a child. Similarly, even if Sandusky was not actually physically raping children in the showers, the mere act of interacting with children while showering with them is suggestive of someone whose sexual boundaries with children are “off”.
What I’m suggesting is not that we turn a blind eye to “exculpatory evidence” but rather that the “evidence” you provide changes absolutely nothing about the actual substance of the discussions taking place. All it does is paint you as someone who is willing to forgive sexual transgressions as long as they don’t cross an arbitrary line into the truly perverse.
Well, in the case of Sandusky, the so-called rape and its attendant imagined horrors were being used to pillory Joe Paterno and accuse him of all manner of horrific attitudes and behaviors. Once it became apparent that it was very likely no rape had occurred, it deprived Paterno’s detractors of much of the basis to justify their wild imaginings. My debunking of the rape scenario was in service to Joe Paterno, not Jerry Sandusky.
As far as Woody Allen goes, I’ve always been a fan and so was interested and disappointed when his relationship with Soon-Yi and what turned out to be its attendant falsehoods first became known. Most of what was being said about Allen at the time didn’t seem to add up, either logically or in keeping with his known past relationships, which all involved adult women and usually accomplished ones at that. Eventually I learned that he and Farrow were never married, that they never lived together, that Soon-Yi was not his adopted daughter, and that she was an adult when their romantic relationship began.
It annoyed me considerably to have been fed such a lot of dishonest bullshit obviously put out by Farrow supporters and a sympathetic or lazy and irresponsible media, and ever since I’ve felt compelled to set the record straight whenever I see that someone else has fallen for the same bullshit. Sometimes I think the recipient of the information might truly want to know, and other times I know from the beginning that he or she couldn’t care less, but either way other people read it and they learn the truth and to me that makes it worth the effort. So while the immediate effect is a defense of Woody Allen, and I’m fine with that, the primary motive behind my posts is to combat the dishonest bullshit about him which has been spread by dishonest people with an agenda ill served by the truth. In short, I’m primarily doing battle with them by seeking to undo their lies rather than seeking primarily to defend Woody Allen.
There was no debunking of the child rape, of course. IIRC, you even (finally!) admitted that it was certainly possible for intercourse to take place in such a position, but you used some ridiculous definition of “standing” to pretend that it was impossible because McQueary didn’t mention bent knees, or something. Not that the child rape is proven, mind you- just that it is consistent with McQueary’s testimony and may well have occurred.
If you accuse Woody Allen and Jerry Sandusky of being armed robbers and of engineering weapons-grade anthrax powder, and I point out that neither accusation is true, am I “defending” them, as you use the phrase?
You are such an obnoxious hypocrite. I still recall your ringing endorsement of Karl Rove in which you willfully ignored any facts contrary to your partisan bias.
If Sandusky is accused of sexually molesting a child, and you say that he couldn’t have, and you ask me to imagine a variety of scenarios about it, and you ask me to use a paper towel tube to simulate the boys anus so that I can try to fuck it, and you subsequently suggest that you used physics to prove it couldn’t have happened, and you make statements that “likely no rape occurred”…
Then I’m going to recognize that you are an extremely creepy sick fuck of a person and a real moron to boot and I’m going to prefer never even having to think of your existence ever again.
Do you have an analogy suited to that scenario Bricker? Because “what if Sandusky was accused of robbery” isn’t really cutting it.
This has been mentioned elsewhere, but once again a little perspective on the Sandusky case seems necessary. The man was accused on more than fifty counts of child molestation and rape, and convicted on most of them. Even the specific instance (Victim #2) that SA seems so fixated on, resulted in conviction on a lesser molestation charge.
Apparently, however, SA still would have us believe that, of all the other, many instances of sexual misbehavior that Sandusky unquestionably carried out, this particular one, IIRC the only one actually confirmed to be witnessed by a third party (and the only one that was brought to Paterno’s notice), never actually happened.
Fortunately, that’s simply SA’s stupid, idiotic opinion. Where it actually counts, i.e. in front of a jury, what Sandusky did or did not do was adequately addressed.
If a person commits a string of serial killings, each one must be proved no matter how many others are certain. The only evidence of rape in the shower room was McQueary’s fleeting observation and description which varied each time he recounted it, first to Paterno, then to the grand jury, then to the Sandusky jury. Even within McQueary’s description however, rape still seems highly unlikely for reasons I’ve argued elsewhere, and given the fact that the jury failed to find McQueary’s description of what he saw to be conclusive evidence of rape, my opinion would seem much more substantive than that of people such as yourself who believe it was rape simply because they want to.
I applaud you for evolving from “the rape was impossible!” to the “rape still seems highly unlikely”. You’re still wrong- it’s not “highly unlikely” (I’d put it as “likely but not certain”), and the jury simply did not find the evidence to show that particular rape beyond a reasonable doubt, but at least you’re a bit less wrong. Good for you!
And there are people who still want to consider Woody Allen a pedophile who was screwing his daughter despite unquestionable proof to the contrary. The fact you continue to believe in the shower room rape in no way means it happened.
And does no one want to answer Bricker’s question? I see the the same response so far that my inconvenient remark about Obama’s comment on employee hour cutbacks drew in the other thread - avoidance and bitter attacks for raising the point in the first place.
Please identify the post where I stated that the case of victim #2 was rape. In my last post, I told you myself that the jury convicted Sandusky of a lesser charge of child molestation on this particular count (and this despite the fact that the victim was never identified by name and did not testify). Unlike you, I’m pretty sure I’ve never pretended to know for sure what happened in that case.
As long as we’re exchanging views, I would also like to remind you that of all the tens of thousands of empty words you’ve expended on this subject, your continued inability to even tangentially acknowledge sympathy or compassion for Sandusky’s many victims may be one of the reasons a lot of people here seem to think you’re an apologist for child molesters. I’m just sayin’.
Let’s be honest here, it’s not like Bricker, of all people, is surprising to hear this kind of defense from. The guy’s religion practically forces him to twist himself into knots in order to argue for people who help defend child molesters. The fact that he’s doing it for somebody who is a total creep while ignoring the facts and what people are actually saying is just being totally consistent with his known personality.
Not having participated in any meaningful way in that thread, I have no idea if your characterization is anywhere close to accurate.
But I have learned from experience what it usually means when someone like you refuses to actually answer the question I posed, and instead froths indignantly about some other scenario more to his liking.
So maybe this is the rare time you’re relating things fairly.