Kavanaugh Can Join Thomas.

[CapnAwesome]

The political devisiveness over this issue is honestly super annoying. The side people take seem to all come down, at least in a lot of cases, to whether they are Republican or Democrat.

Can't we have some Republicans who believe she is telling the truth? Can't we have some Democrats who believe it is a possibility he is innocent due to honest mistaken identity? If the parties were switched, and this guy was a Democrat, and his accuser a Republican woman, would all the Democrats still believe he is guilty? Would all the Republicans still believe her account may not be 100% accurate?

Multiple women came forward accusing Bill Clinton of rape/sexual assault. And his wife, the most recent Democratic presidential candidate whom half of America voted for, defended her husband and silenced the women. Do the Democrats believe those women? Do the Republicans only believe them because they accused a Democrat?

And then we have Divinity on here blatantly saying "All Republicans are evil. All of them." ... and then getting a plethora of kudos for it. Seriously? Are we Democrat/Republican first, and human later?

I'm not a registered Republican, but I have voted for 2 Republicans in the past - McCain and Romney. I have yet to vote for a Democrat. Am I evil? Is my family evil for voting Republican? Are there not more dimensions to a person besides their political affiliation? No side wants to consider that the other side may just have a different way of looking at something, which doesn't automatically make them evil people. And no side wants to consider that maybe they themselves have their own moments of hypocrisy and bias.

This is beyond ridiculous. We should just have a civil war already and get it over with.

Yeah, it's just like democats believe her and republicans believe him. 

It would be a real hard sell to say that if those people, or the people of these forums we're blindly presented the facts of this case without knowing who the people involved or their significance are, they would come to the same conclusion. That is statisicallst impossible that all democats believe the accuser and all republicans believe Kavanaugh.

[Minimalist]

That's not it.  Democrats believe her and republicunts don't give a shit.

[Draconic Aiur]

The political devisiveness over this issue is honestly super annoying. The side people take seem to all come down, at least in a lot of cases, to whether they are Republican or Democrat.

Can't we have some Republicans who believe she is telling the truth? Can't we have some Democrats who believe it is a possibility he is innocent due to honest mistaken identity? If the parties were switched, and this guy was a Democrat, and his accuser a Republican woman, would all the Democrats still believe he is guilty? Would all the Republicans still believe her account may not be 100% accurate?

Multiple women came forward accusing Bill Clinton of rape/sexual assault. And his wife, the most recent Democratic presidential candidate whom half of America voted for, defended her husband and silenced the women. Do the Democrats believe those women? Do the Republicans only believe them because they accused a Democrat?

And then we have Divinity on here blatantly saying "All Republicans are evil. All of them." ... and then getting a plethora of kudos for it. Seriously? Are we Democrat/Republican first, and human later?

I'm not a registered Republican, but I have voted for 2 Republicans in the past - McCain and Romney. I have yet to vote for a Democrat. Am I evil? Is my family evil for voting Republican? Are there not more dimensions to a person besides their political affiliation? No side wants to consider that the other side may just have a different way of looking at something, which doesn't automatically make them evil people. And no side wants to consider that maybe they themselves have their own moments of hypocrisy and bias.

This is beyond ridiculous. We should just have a civil war already and get it over with.

Yeah, it's just like democats believe her and republicans believe him. 

It would be a real hard sell to say that if those people, or the people of these forums we're blindly presented the facts of this case without knowing who the people involved or their significance are, they would come to the same conclusion. That is statisicallst impossible that all democats believe the accuser and all republicans believe Kavanaugh.

That's not it.  Democrats believe her and republicunts don't give a shit.

Which is really weird since it's a SCOPTUS nominee that concerns all not just one side of the political spectrum.

[Minimalist]

Brett the Lying, Drunken, Rapist was a pro-business, All-For-The-Rich- Fuck the Poor, kind of motherfucker long before we found out about his hobbies.

[Aroura]

There seems to be a misconception going on here.

I see pretty much everyone states (some with reservations) that they think Ford is being honest. No one thinks she is outright lying, even RR and Wooters, right? And I think pretty much everyone else also realizes there is a chance that she is mistaken. What odds they give that chance may vary, but there is a chance, right?

The difference is not in who we believe so much as what we do next. Some of us say that this deserves a thorough investigation to find the truth as best we can, and others seem disinterested in the truth, or think that regardless of the truth he should be confirmed. That is the main difference in opinion in this thread, far more than who we believe.

Jor posted the demographics on how conservatives tend to be more invested in authority and liberals tend to be more invested in fairness. I think that's what we are seeing here.

Personally I think he's such a clearly partisan person (ranting about how this is a smear campaign by the liberal left on behalf of the Clintons) and he perjured himself so many times already that he seems unfit for this office regardless of anything else. I'm sure they can easily find another conservative judge who isn't an accused sexual assaulter who will be equally happy to strip away women's rights.

[Pat Mustard]

Don't take this as a criticism, but you're talking from a position of ignorance here.  Now I've never experienced a sexual assault myself either, but I do work with cops who regularly investigate sexual crimes and have had to handle some of the paperwork and it's not at all uncommon if tye victim doesn't disclose for yesrs, even more so if the victim is young when the crime happened.

Either you misread my post, or I didn't make myself clear enough. (The latter is far more likely   ) I absolutely understand that it can be really daunting and scary to disclose sexual assault, even more so if the perpetrator is rich and privileged. I get it. The thing I find suspicious is that she disclosed it at the time when he is set to assume a position of great power, knowing full well that it may put a spanner in the works. I watched her testimony, and found it powerful and believable. I believe her. I just feel convinced that maybe it was the prospect of having someone she knew was capable of sexual assault, up there in a position of power as great as SCOTUS, that gave her the push she needed to actually come forward. In any case, I'm not saying that it makes her testimony any less legitimate or her claim any less worth looking into.

Some of the most harrowing cases of clerical sex abuse were only reported by victims when perpetrators were elevated to high and publicly visible positions. You cannot judge the veracity of such an allegation by the length of time it takes before the victim speaks out.

[RoadRunner79]

@Aroura I just think it’s mostly a matter of evidence.

[DodosAreDead]

The political devisiveness over this issue is honestly super annoying. The side people take seem to all come down, at least in a lot of cases, to whether they are Republican or Democrat.

Can't we have some Republicans who believe she is telling the truth? Can't we have some Democrats who believe it is a possibility he is innocent due to honest mistaken identity? If the parties were switched, and this guy was a Democrat, and his accuser a Republican woman, would all the Democrats still believe he is guilty? Would all the Republicans still believe her account may not be 100% accurate?

Multiple women came forward accusing Bill Clinton of rape/sexual assault. And his wife, the most recent Democratic presidential candidate whom half of America voted for, defended her husband and silenced the women. Do the Democrats believe those women? Do the Republicans only believe them because they accused a Democrat?

And then we have Divinity on here blatantly saying "All Republicans are evil. All of them." ... and then getting a plethora of kudos for it. Seriously? Are we Democrat/Republican first, and human later?

I'm not a registered Republican, but I have voted for 2 Republicans in the past - McCain and Romney. I have yet to vote for a Democrat. Am I evil? Is my family evil for voting Republican? Are there not more dimensions to a person besides their political affiliation? No side wants to consider that the other side may just have a different way of looking at something, which doesn't automatically make them evil people. And no side wants to consider that maybe they themselves have their own moments of hypocrisy and bias.

I absolutely agree. It's concerning to me, what this tells us about our humanity. Some democrats are ready to possibly end up destroying a man's life based on a false accusation. Some Republicans are ready to possibly end up destroying a woman's life by tearing her apart, calling her a false accuser, when she truly has been sexually abused. (Both 'possible' scenarios, I'm not saying that Kavanaugh is innocent or Ford is truthful and not mistaken - I'm simply laying out the possible ways in which either person's life could be unfairly destroyed.) All so that each party's political agenda isn't compromised.
I'm socially and fiscally liberal, but I can't imagine hating someone simply for being Republican. There are several republicans I hate/dislike, but that's because of their individual opinions / statements / political stances. 
In any case, I believe Ford for reasons other than her being a democrat and kavanaugh a republican. 

Either you misread my post, or I didn't make myself clear enough. (The latter is far more likely   ) I absolutely understand that it can be really daunting and scary to disclose sexual assault, even more so if the perpetrator is rich and privileged. I get it. The thing I find suspicious is that she disclosed it at the time when he is set to assume a position of great power, knowing full well that it may put a spanner in the works. I watched her testimony, and found it powerful and believable. I believe her. I just feel convinced that maybe it was the prospect of having someone she knew was capable of sexual assault, up there in a position of power as great as SCOTUS, that gave her the push she needed to actually come forward. In any case, I'm not saying that it makes her testimony any less legitimate or her claim any less worth looking into.

Some of the most harrowing cases of clerical sex abuse were only reported by victims when perpetrators were elevated to high and publicly visible positions.  You cannot judge the veracity of such an allegation by the length of time it takes before the victim speaks out.

For the last time, I'm not judging the veracity of the allegation by the length of time it took for her to speak out. In fact, I'm not judging anything by the length of time it took for her to speak out. I'm simply speculating on her intention/driving force behind speaking out now. I believe Ford.

[John V]

Do you know what 'boofing' and a 'devil's triangle' are? Most of the rest of America does now and they're not at all what Kavanaugh said. And even he doesn't seem to know the rules to a 'drinking game' called 'Devil's Triangle', and apparently neither does anyone else. It was seventies and eighties slang for a threesome with two straight men and one woman, though. Kavanaugh claimed (to a Senate Committee) that the first was a euphemism for farting and the second was a drinking game.

Funny thing is - I posted correct examples of these in this thread and it went on ignored by AM and his Trump supporters. Why? Because they knew Kavanaugh was clearly lying about those terms and they didn't have the balls to admit as much.

No, because I don't care about extraneous issues, whether for Kavanaugh or Ford.

Ford lied that she couldn't testify on Monday due to a fear of flying. Ford lied in calling herself a psychologist. That's a licensed profession in CA, she's not licensed, and it's illegal for an unlicensed person to call themselves that. I haven't mentioned these because they have nothing to do with the alleged assault.

So, if your standard is that once a person is caught in a lie, we can't trust anything they say - fine, Ford can't be trusted about the assault.

Personally I'm concerned with the inconsistencies in the time when the assault allegedly happened, or the number of people there. Those are the lies that matter.

---

Jor posted the demographics on how conservatives tend to be more invested in authority and liberals tend to be more invested in fairness.  I think that's what we are seeing here.

Or that's what researchers want to believe:

How Social Science Might Be Misunderstanding Conservatives

Imagine you and I are out for drinks at a bar. A couple beers in, apropos of nothing, I announce to you, “You know, liberals are way more authoritarian than conservatives.” “No way,” you respond. “Way,” I say, confidently. I pull a sheet of paper from my shirt pocket and slide it to you. “This is my Jesse Singal Authoritarianism Scale, or JSAS for short,” I tell you. “I had 500 people take this short scale and liberals scored way higher than conservatives.”

You look down at the scale and it reads:

For each of the following items, please indicate your level of agreement, from 1 (disagree completely) to 7 (agree completely), with a score of 4 indicating neither agreement nor disagreement.

1. In certain cases, it might be acceptable to curtail people’s constitutional rights in order to stop them from spreading climate-change denialism.

2. The government needs to do a much more comprehensive job monitoring Christian-oriented far-right terrorism.

3. Some people want to act like the causes of racism are complicated, but they aren’t: Racists are moral failures, and that’s that.

If you’re a thoughtful reader, you will, of course, find my claim ludicrous. By dint of the subject matter of my questions the test is basically built to “discover” that liberals are more authoritarian than conservatives. All my questions are rigged in a manner that will, in almost all likelihood, cause political liberals to score more highly than political conservatives on the scale, thus spitting out the “finding” that liberals are more authoritarian.

The above, fictional questionnaire is an extreme example, but a growing insurgency within social and political psychology has begun to argue, credibly, that a version of this has been going on for decades — only the other way around. Liberal psych researchers, centering their work on liberal values and political opinions, have built up a body of knowledge that is fundamentally flawed and biased. As a result, certain false ideas about conservatives and how they differ from liberals may have taken hold.

[Whateverist]

I see pretty much everyone states (some with reservations) that they think Ford is being honest. No one thinks she is outright lying, even RR and Wooters, right? And I think pretty much everyone else also realizes there is a chance that she is mistaken.  

Absolutely. Unfortunately for the shill the republicans have selected to serve their interests, me-too is a topic du jour. Blithely dismissing or blaming the woman is no longer such an easy road to take.

Personally while I believe his accuser is entirely sincere I wouldn't bet the ranch on veracity of her recollections. She is younger than I but my certainty about childhood memories is not good, whereas my sister relates events from that time with the certainty I would what happened yesterday (on a good day). But she is a conspiracy theorist about a lot of things and full of shit, so there is that. So the accuser could of course be mistaken.

But I'm going to celebrate anything that keeps them from further turning the court into one more political branch of government.