Oh, and FTR, both you and old woman yelling at cloud are guilty of caricaturing #BelieveWomen in your haste to vouch woke don’t do nuance, which is somewhat ironic. It’s not #BelieveAllWomenUncriticallyAtAllTimes, but like mansonwas saying, it’s “don’t dismiss their allegations out of hand”. Which is an actually real problem in actual real non-Hollywood life - like this case I’ve recently come across of a woman (black, natch) who went to the police 6 separate times because she was scared of her husband’s behaviour, only to be told to go home and stop being paranoid. He eventually killed her.
You have a problem with someone else’s claim then take it up with them. You have a claim you want to level at me then come out and say it.
Exactly which comments in this thread lead you to doubt my political leanings? In my favour are all the posts I’ve ever written, all the views I have and continue to espouse and a political definition that is pretty much spot-on for me (and again, can be seen independently in other posts I’ve made over the years)
What have you got?
…why do you think the two positions are incompatible?
Lets take your claim that you are a “liberal.” One would think that the belief that “Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to immigrate to America” would be incompatible with “mainstream liberal beliefs”. Yet you clearly think otherwise. So if you can believe that those beliefs are compatible, why are you struggling with the idea that you can be sexist and you can by a misogynist and you can occasionally listen with sincerity to your women friends?
That wasn’t “publicly grovelling.” It was a bog-standard mea culpa.
How exactly does your conspiracy add up?
According to you twitter mobs forced Damon to apologise in order to stop him getting blacklisted.
But then you state that Damon isn’t on Twitter.
So how does that add up?
You insinuate if he didn’t apologize he was going to get blacklisted. Who was going to blacklist him? Which production company? Which producers? Which agency? Which filmmakers?
In the real world it isn’t people like Matt Damon who get “blacklisted” in Hollywood. That is the domain that almost exclusively belongs towomen and people of colour. Its the exact opposite of whatever it is that you imagine. Damon was never in any danger of anything happening to him.
His apology didn’t grovel to the twitter mobs. His apology wasn’t directed to his producers. His apology was initially directed at his friends and his family. You can either take his apology as sincere: or you can imagine a conspiracy theory that ends with Matt Damon lying to everyone.
No, but the interesting thing is that there is valid man-angst in that situation still.
Not in that caricatural sense of “omg this random strange woman is maybe going to ruin my life entire on a fucking whim of hers” obviously, that’d be concerningly paranoid, get help soon imaginary guy.
But ; and maybe it’s just my anecdotal experience as a self-hating misandrist guilt-ridden cucked soyboy talking rather than some universalism ; but imagining this putative meet at 2:30 and positing a generally non-scum man, he might just notice the woman getting tense or anxious. And he might then think “oh my god she’s actually afraid of me. She thinks I’m going to rape her. She thinks I’m a monster. This is really uncomfortable”. And maybe he’ll then feel moved to defuse that untenable tension somehow so that she’ll feel better, safer and maybe in passing validate his image of himself as non-scum. Or maybe he’ll stop and think further “but if I do acknowledge the tension and try to defuse it she’s going to think I’m creeping on her and that will make her even *more *anxious” etc… it’s just going to be a whole Thing. An unpleasant Thing that does not spark joy.
So it leads someplace absurd, this realization that what should be a perfectly neutral and certainly commonplace non-event (i.e. two people of opposite gender waiting for the same night train) could generate so much negativity in them both. It’s one of those things where every individual step made by each of the protagonists makes absolute sense and comes from a rational place and common as muck gender expectations but the end result is… well, insane.
And I don’t really know how we solve that, be it as a society or even as individuals.
(you can even move one insane step further and the woman was not really afraid but the guy thought he should make her feel safe and now she realizes he thinks she’s afraid and she’s feeling sorry for that or embarassed in the name of all womanhood and…
See, this is why this whole “society” idea was a huge mistake)
This.
Just for the record,* I *have no doubts about Bobble’s generally liberal leanings.
Much appreciated, and “generally liberal leanings” is a good way to put it as it allows for the possibility of views not perfectly in alignment and quibbles on the detail and practical application.
But on the big ticket concepts? definitely.
The Damon stuff is ridiculous. He said something dumb, was criticized for it, and then said ‘oops, that was dumb, I apologize’. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing dumb things. #MeToo advocates do not treat every accusation and every crime the same, not even remotely – what Damon said was dumb. And he either recognized it was dumb and apologized, or apologized for some other reason… but either way, it’s appropriate to criticize dumb things that are said, and appropriate to retract and apologize for dumb things one has said.
I can’t speak for women but I think this is an excellent description of how the changes have effected minorities.
I would like to add that the change also allows us to stand up and fight back whenever someone crosses the line without having to turn every little issue into an HR incident. In 40+ years of dealing with America this is the first time I have ever been able to speak directly to white people this freely about race and its effects. I find this new found freedom to be…I can’t find the word(s)…
John Mulaney has a good bit similar to this. What NOT to do is tell the woman “Don’t worry, I’m not going to rape you”
I solve it by simply passing out on the Metro and hopefully waking up at the end of the line.
One possible response,
“He tipped his hat and took a seat
He said he hoped he hadn’t stepped upon my feet”
~Judy Garland, The Trolley Song
~Max
That was shitty. Terrible. Unconscionable. But you are committing the fallacy of the excluded middle, if not flat-out strawmanning me. Let’s review what I actually said:
So where do you get off saying I “don’t do nuance”?
I didn’t say he wasn’t on Twitter. I don’t know if he is or isn’t. I said it wasn’t a situation where he tweeted something and got responses he didn’t like. He said something in an interview which incited outrage, and then he gave another interview where he apologized (although he actually never said he was wrong in what he said, only that he shouldn’t have said it). He doesn’t have to have ever used Twitter in his life for his agent to tell him his position is untenable and that for PR purposes he needs to apologize for having said something, and then plan to keep his mouth shut from now on.
We have been at loggerheads for most of this discussion, but I found this side thread of yours quite insightful and interesting.
What exactly was dumb about what he said? I submit that it was the outraged reaction that was dumb.
No. He’s dead. Didn’t make it to his 25th birthday.
No, it was an actual accusation which snowballed into a rumor. There had been a series of rapes near campus (the “classic” kind, not date/acquaintance rapes but a masked rapist hiding in the bushes). This understandably ignited a fire in town, as well as among worried parents hundreds of miles away. So the local police set up an anonymous tipline–which is a pretty bad idea, as what happened next illustrates.
A young woman called this tipline and reported that she had been raped by my friend Tom on a certain Saturday night. I was contacted by police detectives, which initially got me pretty stressed out as I was kind of a pothead and I had friends who actually did prison time for weed (this was the mid-'90s in a rural Missouri college town). Once I talked to them, I was able to get the investigation into him dropped because as it so happens, he had been with me in Kansas City, hundreds of miles away, for the entire weekend from Friday until Sunday. Two of my friends from high school were also with us the whole weekend, so I gave the detectives their contact info–and they did contact my friends and verified the alibi.
The only problem? These detectives had already gone all around Tom’s dorm and asked his hallmates about it. They never went back to tell those kids that he had been cleared, which I always thought was pretty fucked up. I tried to do some of the damage control myself, but I could not spread myself nearly as far or fast as the rumor mill (there were thousands of students just in his freshman class–I was a sophomore and lived off campus), and in any case even some of the people I talked to directly seemed to think I was just covering for him (they of course didn’t have the benefit of also talking to my high school friends). This is why I have always had a hard time accepting the idea that people are naturally disinclined to believe an accuser. The general attitude seemed be “why would anyone make up something like this?” and “why would the police be investigating it if there is nothing to it?” I don’t know the answer to why someone would make this kind of thing up, but I obviously do know that they would, because they did. 
Tom dropped out at the end of the semester. He was a student of the type considered vulnerable to begin with, as he came from a large family in inner-city Decatur Illinois and was the first person in his family to attend college. He was really smart and was getting good grades, but he could not endure being treated as a pariah. I urged him to at least go back to school somewhere else. I wish I had done more on that front, but I also had my own schooling to focus on.
And he seemed to be happy when I visited him in Decatur. He had moved out of his parents house and was working at a supermarket. His roommates were supposedly good friends he had grown up with, and he introduced me to them with pride. I thought they seemed a little sketchy, but I tried to be openminded. I knew he and his older brothers had engaged in petty criminality when he was growing up, and it turned out these guys were an influence of that kind as well.
After being unable to reach him via phone for several months, the next time I went to Decatur I started calling people in the phone book who had the same last name. I found a cousin who informed me that he had been murdered. This was quite a shock, obviously. I was then later able to find information online about the murder trial and piece together what happened.
Tom went along with these other guys to burglarize a man’s house. They stole a handgun but as they were climbing out the window, the homeowner spotted Tom. After going back to the very apartment where I had visited him and met them, Tom fretted over whether this guy could identify him. The other guys, amped up on meth, became paranoid that “college boy” was going to narc on them. So they plotted to kill him with the gun they had stolen, and ignominiously buried him in a shallow grave under a porta-potty.
In the weeks that followed, these pieces of shit actually bragged about their crime to various acquaintances and even mocked Tom’s last utterance: “Ouch.” :mad: Of course, they all ended up going to prison, although one of them got a lighter sentence for turning state’s evidence on the others. They certainly all got more time than they would have for the burglary, though.
Did that young woman point the gun at Tom and shoot him? No. Would he still be alive without that false accusation? I believe so.
Again with the excluded middle. And not all middles are at precise midpoints. What I want to be is the person saying the misogynistic self-loathing trog has about 10% of a point. And if we steadfastly deny every iota of everything he says, that just helps him recruit the teenage white boys coming up through the pipeline. We have to be honest about some things so the red pill crowd cannot point to our dishonesty to undermine everything else we might want to convey. (Steven Pinker made a similar point about the alt-right and got predictably pilloried for it.)
He was implicitly critical of the #MeToo movement (falsely implying that the movement treats every accusation and form of sexual assault/harassment/rape the same), and he implicitly (or maybe explicitly, depending on how you read it) defended certain flavors of assault/harassment (like “patting someone on the butt”) as not really the same type of issue as assault and rape.
Both of those things are really dumb. He later apologized for it, hopefully because he’s smart enough to realize how dumb they were.
Do you recognize how dumb these things are?
I’m also rather skeptical of claims like “my friend’s life was ruined by a false accusation”. Very rarely could a friend truly know whether such an accusation was false, and even in those rare cases in which they were direct witnesses, rarely could they know if the motivation of the accuser was dishonest.
I’m also rather skeptical of claims like “my friend’s life was ruined by a false accusation” when what really ruined his life was robbing a house with a bunch of meth heads.
At least now we know why Slacker loathes women.
Manson, it was burglary, not the violent crime of robbery. Tom did not have a violent bone in his body. And your other comment, dismissing any sociological explanation for crime in an environment of Rust Belt poverty and putting all the blame on Tom, sounds more like something a right winger would say than anything remotely progressive.
I not only don’t “recognize” it, I emphatically disagree that those things were dumb except in a very cynical and self interested way given the climate. Your own post contradicts itself. You criticize Damon for “falsely implying that the movement treats every accusation and form of sexual assault/harassment/rape the same”, but then in the very same sentence criticize him for saying they are not the same! :smack: That is some grandmaster level doublethink right there, wow.
I of course know beyond the shadow of a doubt that this accusation was false. And how could the motivation of the accuser not be dishonest, anonymously accusing him of rape when he was hundreds of miles away at the time claimed? What kind of honest motivation could lead to that? Besides which, what did the motivation of the accuser have to do with any of this anyway? We were talking about the question of “believing women”, not about what their motivations for false accusations might be.
ETA: Chingon, I certainly do not and I resent the accusation. And yes, I reported you.
…sealioning isn’t about “responses you don’t like.” Its literal harassment. You think its entirely appropriate that if people can’t handle harassment they should leave the internet. So if Damon can’t handle criticism then why do you have a problem with him deciding to keep his mouth shut from now on?
The “outrage” was deserved in my opinion. But even if it wasn’t, then so fucking what? Thats the world we live in right now. We can all express our outrage and be heard instantly on the other side of the world. You can’t stop that. And if you don’t like it, then why is the advice that you have, “get off the internet”, not the appropriate advice to follow here?
What does any of this have to do with “woke culture” or “being cancelled”? You could take this entire sentence and apply it to all manner of different verbal gaffes. He could have defended murderers. He could have said something incredibly racist. Instead he said something about something that you happen to care about. So suddenly its an issue?
Now can you get back to me and tell me how Damon was in danger of being blacklisted? Which companies? Which producers? Which agencies?
I am TRYING TO EAT BREAKFAST