General US Politics

[XRay]

11 hours ago, Dr. Tarrasque said:

Republican voters are easily convinced by Fox News and the like that nonwhites are just mooching off the government by taking food stamps when the reality is that your raging Trump voter is most likely a recipient.

This hypocracy really annoys the hell out of me. Republicans generally live in more conservative areas and pay lower taxes overall, and they have the fucking balls to say lazy minorities are mooching off the system when they are the ones who mooch off of me and Democratic states the most.

[Shoblongoo]

10 minutes ago, XRay said:

This hypocracy really annoys the hell out of me. Republicans generally live in more conservative areas and pay lower taxes overall, and they have the fucking balls to say lazy minorities are mooching off the system when they are the ones who mooch off of me and Democratic states the most.

The lure of outgroup scapegoating is that when you can blame an external influence for the problems of you and your countrymen--you don't have to admit that you fucked up and you've been supporting the wrong policies and the problems the country is facing are the consequences of its own malfeasance. Not "those people."

...and then you actually have to confront the damn problem...

Confronting problems is hard.

Blaming people you don't identify with for your problems and then hating on them for it is easy.

Edited October 18, 2018 by Shoblongoo

[XRay]

10 minutes ago, Shoblongoo said:

Confronting problems is hard.

Blaming people you don't identify with for your problems and then hating on them for it is easy.

I agree that confronting problems are hard, but at least do not drag other innocent people down with you.

When I was unemployed for a while, I felt like shit and drowned in my own self pity and I was not very productive nor too active in job hunting, but at least I did not blame other people for my unemployment.

[Shoblongoo]

38 minutes ago, XRay said:

I agree that confronting problems are hard, but at least do not drag other innocent people down with you.

When I was unemployed for a while, I felt like shit and drowned in my own self pity and I was not very productive nor too active in job hunting, but at least I did not blame other people for my unemployment.

Yeah when I was unemployed my attitude was well its a competitive field I'm in--I knew that when I got into it. Something about me was just less impressive then whoever got that job I applied for instead. Gotta keep improving. Gotta do better. Gotta keep looking for opportunities to impress the right people. If I stick with it, something will turn up.  

Never did I ever get to thinking goddamn affirmative action picks--taking all the good jobs. Of course no one wants to hire another straight white male.  I'd never have this problem if I was a sassy black woman or a flaming gay Puerto Rican. Its reverse racism is what it is. I'd have a great job right now if those people weren't screwing me.

..there are people who think that way...that makes sense to them...

I don't get it. That whole mindset is alien to me. 



   

Edited October 18, 2018 by Shoblongoo

[Johann]

14 hours ago, FrostyFireMage said:

Women get away or get lenient sentences with stuff all the time too, from having sex with underage males to abusing their children to assaulting men. Stop pretending that legal immunity is only available to men.

The overwhelming majority of perpetrators of sexual assault are male, and the overwhelming majority of instances of sexual assault go without justice. You are trying to make a "both sides" argument over something that has an absurdly obvious gender disparity.

14 hours ago, FrostyFireMage said:

Also way to assume I'm a misogynist just because I'm presenting an impartial viewpoint.

Your viewpoint isn't impartial, it's uninformed and based on assumptions, the core of which suggest that these problems are not disproportionately affecting women and perpetuated by men. There are many who make the same arguments who are proud to call themselves misogynists and you're not looking so good when you're echoing them.

[FrostyFireMage]

Do you actually have any proof of that claim?

Edited October 19, 2018 by FrostyFireMage

[Johann]

9 minutes ago, FrostyFireMage said:

Do you actually have any proof of that claim?

what fucking planet are you on

[FrostyFireMage]

A more rational one than the one you're inhabiting at the very least

[Phoenix Wright]

41 minutes ago, FrostyFireMage said:

Do you actually have any proof of that claim?

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/12/28/10-things-we-learned-about-gender-issues-in-the-u-s-in-2017/roughly-four-in-ten-working-women-say-theyve-experienced-gender-discrimination-at-work/

https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence

[FrostyFireMage]

I hate how with crimes like this you either have to deal with the possibility of an innocent man's life and reputation being destroyed or an innocent woman not receiving justice for the trauma she received

[Time the Crestfallen]

5 minutes ago, FrostyFireMage said:

I hate how with crimes like this you either have to deal with the possibility of an innocent man's life and reputation being destroyed or an innocent woman not receiving justice for the trauma she received

It's already been mentioned that the number of false accusations is literally only around 2% mate. These problems are not remotely comparable in terms of frequency or scale.

Edited October 19, 2018 by Time the Crestfallen

[Johann]

40 minutes ago, FrostyFireMage said:

A more rational one than the one you're inhabiting at the very least

Here's your fucking homework, you child. Don't bother wasting anyone else's time here until you've read it all.

• https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics
• https://endsexualviolencect.org/resources/get-the-facts/national-stats/
• https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/sexual-assault-victims/
• https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6166
• https://www.nsopw.gov/en/education/factsstatistics/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1#prepetrators

[FrostyFireMage]

8 minutes ago, Time the Crestfallen said:

It's already been mentioned that the number of false accusations is literally only around 2% mate. These problems are not remotely comparable in terms of frequency or scale.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-new-home/201810/rape-allegations

"Even strong advocates for rape victims admit that false accusations sometimes occur. The real debate is regarding the frequency of these false claims. Some suggest that only 2% of rape accusations are false (a rate that is similar to that of non-sex offenses), while others state that the rate is higher (e.g., 8%). According to a few sources, the rate is significantly higher (e.g., 40%)."

[Time the Crestfallen]

2 minutes ago, FrostyFireMage said:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-new-home/201810/rape-allegations

"Even strong advocates for rape victims admit that false accusations sometimes occur. The real debate is regarding the frequency of these false claims. Some suggest that only 2% of rape accusations are false (a rate that is similar to that of non-sex offenses), while others state that the rate is higher (e.g., 8%). According to a few sources, the rate is significantly higher (e.g., 40%)."

Your source points out that part of the reason for higher percentages is people confusing retractions and unfounded allegations as false, and then literally goes on to conclude that false allegations are a very small percentage of rape claims my dude. Did you even read the article, or did you just look for the one paragraph that seemed like it agreed with your view on the matter?

[Phoenix Wright]

2 hours ago, FrostyFireMage said:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-new-home/201810/rape-allegations

"Even strong advocates for rape victims admit that false accusations sometimes occur. The real debate is regarding the frequency of these false claims. Some suggest that only 2% of rape accusations are false (a rate that is similar to that of non-sex offenses), while others state that the rate is higher (e.g., 8%). According to a few sources, the rate is significantly higher (e.g., 40%)."

you're not being rational. to be rational isn't the same as being centrist, or contrarian, or whatever. it is both accepting truth and understanding what truth looks like. what you are doing is very irrational--you ignore facts for your own worldview.

to assert that false rape allegations are as high as 40% is absolutely preposterous to the point where something in your brain should be yelling at you after reading something like that. if it were really as high as 40%, life would look a lot different in the united states. indeed, if you had read the source, as time the crestfallen has pointed out, you'd know that it's not actually the case. moreover, no one would ever assert it as the case.

now, i don't think psychology today is america's #1 source or anything, so i don't blame you if you'd like to see a quantified explanation for such a high variance. but, you're simply not thinking about the issue as rationally as you might have convinced yourself you are.

Edited October 19, 2018 by Phoenix Wright

[UNLEASH IT]

"Well we can't get the black vote so there won't be a black vote"

Republicans are on some next level shit.

[Shoblongoo]

7 hours ago, FrostyFireMage said:

I hate how with crimes like this you either have to deal with the possibility of an innocent man's life and reputation being destroyed or an innocent woman not receiving justice for the trauma she received

Thats crime. Thats literally every crime.  You just described the general problem of administering criminal justice, and the competing interests of justice to be balanced by a fair system. (thats why the symbol of justice is a balancing scale)

 

That you view this as something uniquely problematic within the context of sexual assault allegations speaks more to where your head is at than the actual fact-of-the-matter-asserted. 

Edited October 19, 2018 by Shoblongoo

[XRay]

3 hours ago, UNLEASH IT said:

"Well we can't get the black vote so there won't be a black vote"

Republicans are on some next level shit.

Well, since we cannot get Republicans to vote Democrat, we might as well just ban the Republican Party.

Well, they are on some next level shit, or at least their voters are. The opioid crisis is mostly in the South and maybe some in middle America. And based on how the media portrays it, it seems to be a mostly white problem. If it were mostly a minority problem, I highly doubt the Republicans would have soften their tone on drugs recently. Actually, now that I think about it, they seem to be only soft on opioids; they are still pretty harsh against weed.

- - - - - - -

Republicans are now smearing Khashoggi so Trump does not look as bad for protecting Saudis. I am not sure that is even necessary since their voters do not care about human rights anyways.

Edited October 19, 2018 by XRay

[FrostyFireMage]

For the record, that 2% false-accusation rate doesn't account for all of the accusations that cannot ever be truly proven true or false. If somebody is that quick to ruin a man's life over the testimony of a woman that cannot be proven or disproven they clearly don't place much value on male lives. And when I see stuff like this in the news I think this whole "guilty until proven guilty" mindset is just hurting the cause of people wanting to make things better.

Sorry if I've offended anyone with what I've said; it definitely wasn't my intention or anything.

[Res]

Others have already said it but it’s really worth reiterating that false accusations aren’t always actually false. 

Victims of rape and sexual assault are often treated horribly by police/medical staff. Like, the mental fortitude one has to have to bring a rape accusation to court is immense. While I have heard dozens of stories of rape from friends, not a single friend has gone so far as to prosecute their rapist. Those that did go so far as to have a rape kit taken at a hospital were so upset by the experience (even if the nurse was sympathetic, it’s quite a cold and cruel kind of examination, and you have to go soon after being raped, when most victims want to shower/hide from the world/be comforted) that they didn’t go any further. 

[Dr. Tarrasque]

3 hours ago, Shoblongoo said:

Thats crime. Thats literally every crime.  You just described the general problem of administering criminal justice, and the competing interests of justice to be balanced by a fair system. (thats why the symbol of justice is a balancing scale)

 
That you view this as something uniquely problematic within the context of sexual assault allegations speaks more to where your head is at than the actual fact-of-the-matter-asserted. 

I think he's just buying in too much into Trump's propaganda and the framing that the #MeToo movement is trying to create a "guilty until proven innocent" environment. At the end of the day, it's "innocent until proven guilty" in our justice system and here's the thing, specially in sexual assault cases, the accused inherently starts with the advantage and if they're innocent, they don't have to do a damn thing, they can literally just say "yeah do whatever investigation you want, I didn't do anything wrong" while the accuser starts at a disadvantage because it is their job to provide the information that leads to proving the accused is guilty beyond doubt and failure to do so is not met well. 

In sexual assault cases, that's extremely fucking hard to do and if it does end up being that the accusation is false (which again, is extremely rare) the repercussions are heavy and the accused can strike back with a defamation lawsuit. The entire notion of any random woman being able to come forward with a false accusation and thus being able to ruin a man's life with ease using false accusations should realistically only lose credibility with Kavanaugh's debacle and Trump's presidency because the stigma that's come of this is only evidence of their fears of coming forward. Instead, conservatives are pushing it as evidence supporting their talking point despite evidence proving otherwise.

Again, if Kavanaugh was innocent, he didn't have to do jack shit and just let an investigation go through unrestricted. Instead, he tried to paint himself in such a way that people in his life could step in and call you out for lying.

If Trump was innocent, there wouldn't been tweets and statements where there's question of whether or not he committed obstruction of Justice.

17 minutes ago, FrostyFireMage said:

 And when I see stuff like this in the news I think this whole "guilty until proven guilty" mindset is just hurting the cause of people wanting to make things better.

And that's fair but it's more of a call for people to think critically and those in power/leadership/law enforcement positions to take action judiciously to make sure they're doing the right thing. 

Yes, there are people who do jump to conclusions and assume guilt too quickly but unless they're in a position of power to actually do anything with that assumption, they're just noise and insufficient reason to stigmatized people coming forward.

17 minutes ago, FrostyFireMage said:

If somebody is that quick to ruin a man's life over the testimony of a woman that cannot be proven or disproven they clearly don't place much value on male lives. 

It's more about the fact that men are statistically more guilty of crimes and negative things people bring up than the value of males. I'm male and I don't see my life as valued less because I'm a male, I see it more like other males perpetuate things we shouldn't be doing and as a result make all of us look bad. Example.

Talk to fathers who have daughters: They know what boys were like in high school and it's why the protective father-daughter dynamic is so common.

Edited October 19, 2018 by Dr. Tarrasque

[Shoblongoo]

2 hours ago, FrostyFireMage said:

 when I see stuff like this in the news

...and what exactly do you expect the school to do in that situation??? NOT investigate claims that a female student was sexually assaulted by a classmate???

An accusation was made. It was diligently investigated. It was determined to be false and malicious. The accused had his name cleared and is now exercising his right to sue the false accuser in civil action for defamation of character. 

The system treated all parties fairly and reached the correct outcome through sound process; GOOD

The system worked. That's how it should always work. 

Its not a problem if you have false allegations.

Its a problem if you have a system that doesn't do its due diligence in vetting truth and falsity when an allegation is made (i.e. an allegation is made. The allegation is not diligently investigated. Its prejudged that the accuser is a skanky ho and if something happened, she must have wanted it to happen. Or its prejudged that the accused is a respected man of upstanding public character and he would never do such a thing--he needs to be protected from these "allegations." etc., etc., etc.) 

If you're gonna identify problems, identify the right problems.

And if you're gonna get mad, get mad about the right things.
 

2 hours ago, Res said:

Victims of rape and sexual assault are often treated horribly by police/medical staff. 

100% true.

You want something to get bothered about, @FrostyFireMage?  Here's a story from a case I worked on a few years back.

Woman goes to a bar with her friends. Upstanding, professional woman; she had a degree in psychology and a career in clinical work. She had one (1) beer. Someone slipped something in her drink. The next morning a pair of homeowners found her passed out on their couch with their door busted open. They think she broke in, tried to rob them, and passed out drunk in their living room. They call the cops.

Cops show up and do their crime scene investigation.

Woman explains that she only had one beer before blacking out and waking up in a strange house with physical signs of rape trauma; she thinks someone drugged her, raped her, broke into the house, and left her there. 

The cops don't investigate her claim that she was drugged and raped. They accuse her of making up stories to try and get herself out of trouble. Then they arrest her and charge her with burglary + criminal trespass. 

At some point, they perform a bloodtest on her. They never release the results of the bloodtest. They claim they don't have the results of the bloodtest and that they can't investigate her claims or drop the charges against her until they have the results of the bloodtest. This goes on for months.

The cops were lying--they had the results of the bloodtest.

We know the cops had the results of the bloodtest because the woman came to our office, told us what was going on, and we sued the police + compelled them to produce the contents of their investigatory file as part of the lawsuit.

The file showed that they had the results of the bloodtest within days of the reported incident and that the woman had almost no alcohol in her system--which would have been impossible if she had gotten so drunk the night before that she had blacked out--but that she had tested positive for rohypnol. (i.e. "the date rape drug")

The cops had the results of that test and knew this woman had been drugged and raped within days of the initial incident.

...and they never pursued it...

Because they made the snap-judgment when they arrived on scene that the victim was just a rock-bottom drunk who had so much to drink the night before that she didn't remember having sex with a random stranger and committing a break-in.   

And once evidence to the contrary emerged, they didn't want to admit they were wrong.
_________

^^^
THAT's a problem. That's a real problem.

Men getting pissy because accusers actually get to confront them on equal footing now without a starting assumption that the woman wanted it or is making it up isn't a problem. 

 

[Res]

I’ve had at least two people very close to me who suspected they were drugged; one of those incidents I witnessed and I agree that she was drugged. Luckily in both situations they had actual decent men (a boyfriend in one situation and a Good Samaritan in the other) take care of them.

I wanted to add that rape/sexual assault is exceedingly common and if you don’t think it is then you’re probably just not told about it. Women tend to tell other women (and male victims often tell nobody). Women often tell in women-only groups and nearly every one prefaces their story with ‘my husband/partner/parents don’t know.’ I’m literally the only woman I know who hasn’t experienced rape or (bad) sexual assault myself and either my sisters, friends and acquaintances are all liars or it is actually that common and women just don’t feel safe telling most men.

[Time the Crestfallen]

6 hours ago, Dr. Tarrasque said:

I think he's just buying in too much into Trump's propaganda and the framing that the #MeToo movement is trying to create a "guilty until proven innocent" environment.

Nah, there's more to it than that. Hysteria surrounding false rape accusations has been a thing in the Red Pill and MRA circles of the internet way before Trump or #MeToo got started. I should know, because I (though I loath to admit it) bought into some of it when I going through my 'Enlightened Centrist®' phase.

[Phoenix Wright]

7 hours ago, FrostyFireMage said:

For the record, that 2% false-accusation rate doesn't account for all of the accusations that cannot ever be truly proven true or false. If somebody is that quick to ruin a man's life over the testimony of a woman that cannot be proven or disproven they clearly don't place much value on male lives. And when I see stuff like this in the news I think this whole "guilty until proven guilty" mindset is just hurting the cause of people wanting to make things better.

Sorry if I've offended anyone with what I've said; it definitely wasn't my intention or anything.

you see? even now you refuse to see that anyone besides you might have a point. you shift the goal posts in order to tell yourself you're still rational.

i cannot stand to see this shit because this board is full of people like this. you're not offending anyone; in fact, what you're doing is a disservice to yourself.