I like the way you think.
Fuck Matt Lauer too!
‘I don’t remember it quite that way but there’s enough truth for me to feel ashamed.’ More steaming horseshit. You’re a sexual creep. Like every creep in the fucking park. Don’t imagine for one minute you are in any way different or better because you make this lame ass, smarmy half acknowledgement. Own your fucking shit you dirtback. Let’s don’t pretend you don’t know the weaseling when you hear it, or fucking say it. You’re a damn reporter! Would you let a guilty politician, caught out, worm around with these mincing bullshit words?
What a slimy response that is. You feel ashamed now, because you got caught. Too bad you had no moral fibre when it would have saved some underling from your creepy sexual harassing.
I swear to God, their statements just get oilier and more disgusting each time. If this is all you can fucking muster than just hang your head in shame and close your trap, and slink off to under some rock somewhere.
And all the staff at the show saying they love him! They’re shocked to learn of this! More fucking horseshit. And an insult to everybody watching. Would you say that of your cousin when he was revealed as a child molestor, just because he’s always been sweet at Christmas and holidays! Of course not.
How about you grow some journalistic balls and call the prick out for the shit stain that he is? If you had no idea you owe the harassed women an apology as well. And someone should be seriously re examining your qualifications as a fucking newshound. Congratulations on getting some of that oil shit stain on yourself!
Bill and Hillary Clinton were pretty bad too. And Hillary didn’t just defend Bill, she persecuted his victims.
Everyone used to think that Weinstein and Matt Lauer were taking advantage of their power to bed young starlets who wanted to get into show business. Now it is clear they were predators. Matt Lauer also threw a series of his female co-hosts under the bus whenever the ratings started to slip. I don’t know how the today show fired 2 emmy award winning female journalists and kept the guy that graduated from college at the age of 39 then went on to do fluff pieces; but I suspect that it was dudes who decided who should be blamed for falling ratings.
What, I’m not invisible? Woohoo.
I thought that BCP mischaracterized the post. I looked at it as self-reflection which I generally find to be a good thing. When people tell me that action X is bad, I decide whether I agree it is bad, review whether I do X, and if so, I stop. Even when it’s something “everyone knows” is wrong. Some of us weren’t raised right, and we’re still learning. Some of us are in positions we never expected to be in and we take our cues from others–many times in error.
Do not take this to mean I excuse anyone’s actions. Ignorance is no excuse, and if you did something wrong, you get the consequences. I just understand that some people are just now looking at things they’ve done in the past and are going, “Holy shit, that was some asshole behavior. Thank goodness I stopped doing that.”
I also said that I take these apologies with a grain of salt, because they are all so damned self-serving.
To recap: I disagree with way BCP described the post; I do not necessarily agree with or believe everything in said post. YMMV.
I spent much of the Thanksgiving week talking to my grandson, who is 13, about sexual harassment, sexual assault, bullying, and why not to do it or allow it to happen to you or others without telling someone. I’m just tired of everything and hope that we can resolve this shit and move forward. It’s sad when half the world has always seen something and the other half seems to just have had their blinders removed, and they are **not **liking the view.
Oh, I’ve never been to American Thinker* before. Surely this will be informative.
Well, there’s 30 seconds of my life wasted. I don’t know that I would consider all the people on that list “Leftists”, though some of them are known to have beliefs commonly seen to be “liberal”, and others appear to be elected officials that have a (D) after their names.
*hilarious misnomer.
Very well said. Thanks for contributing!
He’s a reporter but he’s also a human being and it’s a pretty common reaction to try to weasel out of consequences when caught with your hand in the cookie jar. I’m not saying that’s laudable or even excusable, but it is common. Just like lying about adultery is common as dirt (Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman”). I don’t know why you expect reporters to react differently than other people when they become the story.
Lauer didn’t just go after underlings, he also went after his peers, apparently (my reservation is because I don’t have access to all the facts here).
Why is that horseshit? Maybe he was a fantastic guy to the people he didn’t harass or take a dump on. Again, that doesn’t excuse his behavior but if a given individual didn’t experience harassment and was not present when harassment occurred why are you shocked that they’re shocked at the revelation? I certainly don’t know everything my friends, acquaintances, and coworkers are up to, at times I have been shocked to learn one or another did something bad.
Er… I think you have this mistaken notion that people who do bad things are bad all the time. They aren’t. Even professional criminals can be quite charming, generous, etc. when they aren’t actually behaving badly. That is, in part, how they get away with these sorts of things.
“My cousin has always been a nice guy around me and behaved appropriately around me” and “My cousin is a convicted child molester” are not, in fact, mutually exclusive statements. That doesn’t make the person ignorant of the crime automatically complicit. It doesn’t even mean they’d be opposed to a jail sentence for such a criminal. It just means that they genuinely weren’t aware of the problem and literally did not see it. What, you think you can spot a child molester just by looking at him or her? You think people doing bad things make no effort to conceal their misbehavior?
I think you fail to understand that, and instead insisting that anyone who ever at any time engaged in any form of harassment whatsoever is uniformly a nasty, evil person to everyone. That’s not reality. Bad people aren’t entirely bad, just as good people aren’t entirely good.
Given the pervasiveness of this problem throughout society it is almost certain that you, yourself, interact with sexual harassers and abusers. If you insist that anyone who associates with with such people without calling them out is also guilty then you, yourself, are guilty even if you are not aware of it because by your standard you should just, somehow, KNOW that those nasty people you interact with are nasty, even if they’re polite and well behaved around you. You set up an impossible standard where everyone is guilty, and equally guilty.
And that’s why what you’re doing is a witchhunt. It’s guilt by accusation, it’s guilt by association, even when the target of your ire is genuinely unaware of the wrong-doing.
Let me get this straight - you’re going after people who might well be ignorant of Lauer’s actions because Lauer never did those things in front of them, and may have taken care that there were no witnesses? You expect everyone around Lauer to be psychic and magically know everything bad he’s ever done?
Calm down a bit. I’m getting tired of your hysteria. And it is hysteria. I get that you’ve been hurt in the past (haven’t we all?) but your reaction is getting way over the top.
Yes, ambitious people will use others and will throw others under the bus when convenient for them. Am I the only one NOT surprised by this? Our society does not reward being nice, it rewards being single-minded, aggressive, and self-serving. Surprise, surprise - many at the top of their profession turn out to be nasty, self-serving asshats willing to throw colleagues under the bus to save their own skins. Also in the news: water is wet.
Quite likely.
If it helps any, I’ve noticed that this week NBC’s morning line-up has almost no men left in it. Al Roker is still doing the weather so maybe he’s innocent of harassing others (even if by your standards he’s guilty guilty guilty merely by having been a coworker of Lauer’s), but this week’s main line up has been Savannah Guthrie, Hoda Kotb, and Kathie Lee Gifford with additional guest hosts. The men are toppling like dominoes, but instead of replacing men with more men as in the past there seems to be a replacement of men with women.
I don’t have a problem with Lauer being kicked to the curb - NBC apparently did look into the accusations and acted in accord with company policies. He’s had his day in the sun, he made a crapton of money, enough that he doesn’t have to work another day in his life if he uses some rudimentary budgeting skills so his family needn’t starve, and if there’s anything criminal there let the courts handle it.
So it is wrong for this musician to have sex with a fan (assuming she is over 18 and sober and not only willing but the person who pursued the sexual encounter)?
As with all things, it depends on the person. It’s legal, but it may not be right. That has nothing to do with my posts.
Why does it have nothing to do with your posts?
Whose job is it to make sure the woman is not making a mistake?
Assuming she is adult… it’s the woman’s responsibility.
Just like it’s the responsibility of an adult man to avoid mistakes.
Women do not need guardians/keepers/etc. if you start with the assumption they’re full human beings.
This has nothing to do with being a woman. It’s not always appropriate or ethical to have sex with someone who wants to have sex with you–for example, if you know they are in love with you and you don’t care about them, if they are acting out of self-loathing or depression, if they feel obligated . . .the list goes on and on. It’s not always a person’s job to know all these things about a potential sexual partner, but if it’s really fucking obvious you aren’t allowed to remain willfully ignorant of contributing to someone else’s pain just to get your rocks off.
Also, regardless of the impact on the other person, I think there’s a solid argument to be made that sex that is that rooted in those sorts of circumstances is bad for both partners. It erodes the soul to take pleasure from someone who isn’t in the same place or approaching the encounter with the same attitude.
Yes: Sex as an assertion of privilege is never okay.
We are collectively experiencing a dismantling of privilege.
That’s another reason why people need to feel as free to say “no” as to say “yes”. If the rock star says “no” to a groupie then the groupie needs to back off, not keep at the rock star. As a hypothetical example.
There are a few new cracks in a very old and very thick wall. I’m not entirely sanguine that the process will get as far as “dismantling.” I believe we shouldn’t be anywhere near as complacent as to think so, there’s far too much work yet to do.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I hope so.
Yes.
Is that what is happening when someone takes advantage of a power imbalance? Because that’s what the initial post I was commenting on was about. I’m not interested in a long discussion about all the things that should be considered by both parties before a sexual encounter takes place.
And, as usual, Manda JO says it better than I would anyway.
While you’re being all informative and shit, care to address the multiple trips Trump (and Bill Clinton, who’s also a rapist shitbird) took on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express” and his fun trips to Epstein’s private rape island?
Of course, Trump does his very best to distance himself, even having a mouthpiece claim he doesn’t actually know Epstein–but look at all those phone messages!
Trump’s another child molesting rapist piece of shit along with Roy Moore and countless others (Dennis Hastert, anyone?) on the GOP side of the aisle.
This isn’t a right/left political issue, this is a privileged male dominance and control issue so would the rest of you insanely stupid shitbag rape apologists for the rich ass child molesters kindly insert yourselves into your own assholes until you disappear entirely? That would be great.