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GreyjoyBastard posted:really getting the impression that this thread's culture and/or posting standards might be better suited to cspam We do tend to believe women in cspam. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 9, 2021 03:45
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Willa Rogers posted:One of the things I've thought about is how Dem sexual abuse & harassment is usually only covered by rightwing media, which makes it easy for liberals to dismiss such news as "Another rightwing smear job by a discredited hack outlet. Willa, this is a fantastic post, and while I'd love to comment on it, I don't want to appear to be "cheerleading" or "white noise posting" so I'll simply say in response to this that I really wish this was the direction the stickied Media Analysis & Criticism thread took, but I've been (not surprisingly, really) disappointed in it largely being a "trust the established sources" cheerleading thread. With the Reade story specifically, it seems there was an effort (coordinated? instinctual? it's hard to say) to, in practice, force Ms. Reade to resort to going to Fox News etc because she, to use the media's term, "shopped" the story around to various "resistance" media a la the 24/7 networks who refused to run the story. It wasn't until a small, but vocal contingent of Bernie supporters raised enough of a stink for CNN/MSNBC/whathaveyou to come out and say "well she tried to sell us this story, but we didn't find it credible because she was already talking to FOX news about it, therefore she must have an agenda!" It all flowed together like some self-fulfilling rube goldberg prophecy of manufactured consent, and the amount of mental gymnastics done by even the most tepid of leftists that supported, say, Bernie going on FOX news and giving a town hall about medicare for all is...baffling at best. Moving on, I'm going to tell a story - a story about a correctional officer and the politician that hid their sex crimes. It's a story about a small town, in a small district (~65k people) that's largely informed by understanding the dynamic of an Italian-American family with lingering ties to one Raymond Loreda Salvatore Patriarca - to be blunt: my grandfather ran books for him. My grandfather had 3 kids - A WW2 vet running the books for the state's most influential crime family, he taught them early and he taught them well that A Good Person is loyal to two things: their family and their country - and the family always comes first. This story is going to focus largely around one of those siblings - to avoid any sort of gender-induced bias, I'll simply refer to them as Sam. Samuel? Samantha? Samir? Samus? It's not important. Largely protected from the "made" life by a father that wanted better for his kids, Sam went to college to become a teacher, transitioned into being a guidance councilor and eventually ran for school committee and entered into the arena politics. Being a former teacher, they did well in advancing policy goals that benefitted the students, and served a number of years on the committee until their aspirations drew them to an even bigger prize - 900 Smith Street, Providence, RI - the RI House of Representatives. Aided by my mother as Sam's campaign finance manager, and myself a young, fresh out of high school naive idealist knocking on doors, Sam handily won the seat in 2007 - a position she enjoys today, 14 years later. Sam has run unopposed from the left, and has had naught but a token opposition effort from their right - It's such a blue district that any Red party spending there would be a waste. Sam has a son, and, like many politicians, Sam's son is a textbook failson - the product of helicopter parenting, he flunked out of college, flunked out of I used to party with Rick. Rick married a stripper who could roll a mean blunt, and there were always girls and cocaine at the party house. What horned up, cokehad 25 year old wouldn't want to hang out with a bunch of strippers and drugs? Unfortunately, for my part in this, I was too worried about cocaine and tits to see a lot of the red flags that were being waved all around me - when you're doing coke in a house with a 4th grade kid, you're mostly looking to make sure they're not around, not to see if they're being groomed as a victim by their new step-dad. Eventually, things get toxic, he stats beating his wife (which we didn't find out until years later - Sam keeps a Metal Gear Solid 2 level of control over how, when, and what information gets out about Sam and their nuclear family), she leaves him for another woman, takes the kid with her, and is off living her best life. Marriage #1 goes down the drain, and while some accusations of abuse come to the surface, they predictably end with no justice to the victims because the abuser is connected - Sam proudly states at holiday dinners that they don't know the issues they vote on, they just vote how Speaker Mattiello tells them to - Sam's a loyal servant to the party apparatus and is rewarded with the full breadth and width of protections that can be offered by the state. Stick with me, here - I know this is a lot of preamble but I've never gotten this entire thing all down on paper together, and we're almost there, I promise. A few years go by, and Rick re-connects with his high school sweetheart - a public school teacher (just like mommy - yikes!) who, coincidentally, was my Spanish 1 teacher in junior high. Being a stellar student myself, I'd always had a good relationship with teachers, and my mother being the person that handed out paychecks at the school administration office when physical paychecks were still a thing for PMC-class jobs had my family at large with a pretty good relationship with all the teachers myself or my sisters ever had. I'll spare a lot of the details of how that marriage went down in flames, but will touch upon a couple of points quickly: they had a child, Rick wanted nothing to do with it (he obviously learned from his own dead beat father, who'd been out of the picture for years before I was even born), domestic violence, and the coerced termination of a second baby diagnosed in-womb with downs' syndrome (this last one is important to the overall discussion of womens' rights and bodily autonomy but probably doesn't have a space in this narrow discussion lane so I'll reader's digest it by saying that a certain politician featured already in this story was a strong proponent of the pregnancy termination, just after she'd voted down a bill that would have protected a Rhode Island woman's right to seek a safe and discrete termination). My Spanish teacher (let's go with "Jessica") eventually left Rick - given the pattern of behavior we'd become familiar with, no one was surprised. As a divorced dad, Rick was awful. When he had custody, he'd drop the kid off with his junkie friends and crawl over to some dive bar on Oakland Beach, and not answer his phone when the child's mother called looking for him and her kid. Like I said - textbook failson of a politician. That's when we started seeing the dirty laundry. Jessica reached out to another cousin of mine who was a social worker working within the CT juvenile system and started sharing. Rick took a 16 year old inmate into a private cell and raped her. Rick's sealed disciplinary file contains evaluation after evaluation with the words "exhibits predatory grooming behavior," a history of violent, explosive reactions to inmates in his care, and it was all very easy for the State Representative Allied With The Correctional Officers' union to make disappear - in the oddly purple political profile of Rhode Island, "you're going to believe a convicted criminal when they accuse a guard of raping them?" is a perfectly "normal," and expected take, and so it ws that the only unsealed evidence of any impropriety by Rick is in the paperwork relating to Divorce #2 - Jessica has asked us (those of us in the family that see through Rick and Sam's bullshit) to not open this wound again, to let her move on, and let this issue die. Eventually, something had to give, and one prisoner in his "care" made enough of a stink that a social worker got involved, deemed there was "unprofessional behavior," and Rick was reassigned to the boys' juvenile facility, with a note that he was barred from being posted at the women's juvenile correctional facility...unless it was for overtime. That's it. That's the punishment that was negotiated between the state, the RIFOCO, and Sam and Rick. Rick's punishment is getting paid time and a half to patrol the cell blocks where he raped and assaulted inmates, but only little a bit, as a treat. Justice Served?
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Jun 16, 2021 15:27
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Willa Rogers posted:Holy crap, what a story. Every single time I think about all of it, it makes me a little sick. I feel culpability at the perpetuation of the systems and people that defend disgusting, pedophile sex pests because I know all of these things that incontrovertibly happened, but I feel like I wouldn't be a good ally to victims if I simply disregarded their own wishes to be able to move on and leave their trauma in the past - especially given that this particular set of incidents has had a lot of work done to bury, hide, and discredit any evidence that might be out there, and I fully understand that it can be intensely re-traumatizing to go through a "dog and pony show" investigative process that's going to predictably dead-end.
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Jun 16, 2021 17:54
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I have a hard time about what to do about sexpest artists whose work I do/did appreciate. I think, ultimately, for me it comes down to what I have left to give to the "economy of care" - just as I've had to come to grips with it being largely impossible to do anything "ethically" in a late-stage capitalist society I think we also have to look at whether or not it's possible to enjoy any product that comes out of an industry with a long, public history of abuse of not just fans by an artist, but of artists by their agents or whathaveyou - just look at Harvey Weinstein. I tend to fall on the line of "hurt people hurt people" because I know that when I hurt, there's a little voice inside me that I have to squelch that says "other people should hurt the way you do right now." There is, uncomfortably, a certain level of acceptance of the toxic state of any given entertainment industry - I can be fairly certain that, say, Kesha hasn't raped anyone, but Kesha's last album wasn't just Kesha's product - there was an entire unit of the recording company that was involved in, and stands to profit from sales/streams of the album. For all I know, every time I listen to Potato Song, a half a dozen rapists or sex pests that aren't Kesha are getting royalty payments. It's real, real easy to say "I won't watch anything with noted sexpest Kevin Spacey in it," because a name like Kevin Spacey is going to be up in lights. It's difficult, anxiety-inducing, and nigh impossible to say "I won't listen to anything where Studio Technician #4 helped with the mixing" and at some point I just have to take it that, yeah, there's probably a sexpest in that pipeline somewhere. To put it in a different context, I have two grocery stores within walking distance from me: Publix and Wal-Mart. Both of their heir families are big time supporters of the American Red Political Party's agenda - Publix's heiress funded the January 6th Hoveround Mobility Scooter and Assorted Catheter Brands Convention and DC-Police Guided Tour of the Capitol Building and I don't think I need to really provide a ton of detail as to what kind of absolute ghoulish poo poo the Walton family of Walmart gets up to. Due to a medical condition, I don't drive, and I'd rather not have my wife turn on the car and burn a bunch of fossil fuel driving all over South Florida looking for a place to ethically obtain the materials needed to create sustenance for us to eat and live - I wager that any fossil fuel burned in the pursuit of ethical consumerism is self-defeating to the purpose of ethical sourcing entirely. Lib and let die fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jun 17, 2021 |
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Jun 17, 2021 17:20
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some plague rats posted:Here's something else I'd like to bring up. First up, I fully understand your reaction so I don't want it to seem like I'm picking on you or anything. But to any other guys who might read this, please DO NOT do this. this is exactly why I'm always hesitant to tell any of the men in my life about the poo poo that's happened to me: because the first response is always oh boy, time to make this all about me! Finally I get to respond by doing Angry Rightous Man Things and live out the Liam Neeson film that's permanently playing in my head! Regardless of how correctly it's directed, the last thing I want to hear when I'm telling someone about the sexual violence I've experienced is more loving male anger. Firstly, I'm telling you something deeply personal and it would be nice if we could talk about me for a minute, and what it means, and why I'm telling you this, not about how you want to deal with it. Second, if I'm telling you this, it's clearly because I love and trust you deeply and DO NOT WANT YOU TO DO SOME DUMB poo poo AND GET ARRESTED. I've got my own way of dealing with things, and I would like to know that if I tell you something I don't have to plan in advance for you reacting violently because then you're just another loving facet of the guys I'm telling you about! I know this might come off as white noise, but I really appreciate this. I don't recall if it was here or in the thread that lead to this being reopened for discussion, but I've mentioned that my wife is a survivor and it all happened years before I met her and I struggle a lot sometimes with keeping my mouth shut because Circumstances dictate that he's part of conversation at my in-laws' house. See, my father-in-law was a transmission builder (fun side note: in the handful of years I've been around, I've not once heard him use the full word for 'transmission') in South Florida in the mid-80's/early 90's. One of the installers or one of the other builders, I don't really know, I kind of tune out and just nod along when this conversation comes up - usually on the back of "there sure are some hosed up people down here in South Florida, especially those n-words, they're nothing like the ones back home in Rhode Island!" - long story short this builder or installer or whatever drugged and "tried to do poo poo to [my wife]" (I haven't pressed her on what that specifically means, and it's not really my business to IMO). This scumbag gets in a scuffle one night with an armed (Black, my father in law will make sure that you understand that the person responsible here is Black) man, got himself shot, and bled to death in an empty gas station parking lot. My father-in-law will bemoan it to the high heavens - "he was such a good friend," "I really liked that guy," "he was such a great builder!" and it's everything I can do to not scream that the man he's standing there informally eulogizing got what he loving deserved and died a lowlife scumbag's inglorious death because he laid his hands on your daughter and my loving wife.
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Jun 22, 2021 15:41
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VitalSigns posted:The #metoo thread bring used to defend a rich and powerful rapist getting off on some bullshit excuse is so on brand For liberals, the institution is sacrosanct - it matters less that a convicted rapist goes free and more that We Followed The Rules, And By Following The Rules Arrived At The Most Just Outcome. It's tangentially related to the thread at best, but it's the only link I can build between liberalism and the wordy, legalese justifications for why this wasn't a miscarriage of justice in a wealthy abuser's favor. It always leaves me feeling a bit like that trite line from No Country For Old Men and the outcome of following rules for the sake of following rules. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jul 1, 2021 13:43
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PT6A posted:Well, yeah, absolutely. I'm just curious how this line of argument -- that the criminal justice system routinely fucks people over -- leads to "...and that's why we should ignore prosecutorial misconduct in this case." The problem is too few people have access to this sort of remedy, and it seems like a particular slap in the face that it's given to a rich rapist and not someone who is factually innocent or guilty of only a minor crime. What is being remedied? The accommodations afforded Mr. Cosby through his wealth privilege have only gone so far as to cause another illness: that of the open, brazen display of "rich people interact with the court system like this, filthy poors interact with the court system like this." and this has almost assuredly done some level of psychic damage not just to the victims/survivors directly in this case, but to victims/survivors of other high-profile, rich, media-beloved rapists. "Remedy", intentionally or not, conveys that there was something here that needed to be treated - there wasn't. This essential oil of a treatment did nothing but re-traumatize victims - how do you propose we remedy that?
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Jul 6, 2021 15:12
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How are u posted:I'm a little bit confused by this, too. A lot of folks are asserting that Cosby got off because "he's rich" but it seems like the circumstances of his release aren't dependent on that? Do you have sources?
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Jul 6, 2021 17:23
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VitalSigns posted:You didn't understand what I said if you think this is a rebuttal. It's also flat-out absurd to think that public defenders - both ill-funded and worked to death, simply are able to devote the same kind of time, effort, and experience on behalf of a poor wrongly-accused person as can be dedicated to the prosecution levied by a legal team backed with millions - or even billions of dollars behind it (or vice-versa as in the specific case of Cosby's legal team's dedicated effort and financial backing). It's the absolute thinnest of veils over the fact that in most cases, the rich can just throw money at the legal system until it gives.
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Jul 7, 2021 19:28
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There's been some reaction in some of the more devoted pockets of "redpillism", Ben Garrison had some pretty bog standard stuff to say that is more banal than offensive...until you read the very last sentence (spoilered for content because that last line re: Weinstein really is a loving doozy) : Billy Cosby was released from prison. After all, the feminists had no concrete evidence against the man—just a ‘me too’ pile on. Maybe Weinstein will be sprung next. I presume Rashad will be treated as a victim of a cancel culture pressure campaign that's akshually a show of how racist the tolerant left is, the whole Candace Owens shtick - and maybe I'm overthinking it but whether it's a consensual media blitz or not could be a bit of a revealing look at media attitudes towards women in general.
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Jul 8, 2021 20:17
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Timeless Appeal posted:I think the question now in terms of consequences is if there are Any? I don't think anyone's going to be shocked by the report - the battle lines are mostly already drawn, I think. We're a considerable way away from an election cycle, so not being familiar with gubernatorial politics, what happens at this point if Cuomo resigns? I have to presume that there's some republican toad waiting in the wings for their shot at the seat, but who are the dems going to run? Is this a special election situation or does the state legislature just appoint someone until the next election? Are we going to get pressure campaigns of "if you think Cuomo should step down/be impeached then you want a current democrat position filled by a republican, do you?!" With all that's been explicitly laid out in the report, it's going to be a wild ride watching how the state and media apparatuses move forward. The nursing home poo poo wasn't enough to kill Cuomo, I really don't know if this can either.
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Aug 3, 2021 18:10
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Even if he stepped down, there's nothing indicating that you wouldn't immediately get a replacement who was complicit in the whole affair. Yeah, it really sounds like a lot of this was damningly normalized, and there's no way that happened without it being intertwined with the NY gubernatorial office's culture from top-to-bottom. The fish rots from the head down, poo poo rolls downhill, however you wanna put it, there's a massive picture of a morally bankrupt culture that the report exposes, intentionally or not. It's straight-up cover-up levels of normalization of sexual assault.
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Aug 3, 2021 19:48
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Willa Rogers posted:And this goes for the Matt Lauers, Harvey Weinsteins & Woody Allens in the media and the arts; it's larger than just politics. It's inflated self-importance, bc they're surrounded by people and a public who tell them how wonderful they are, even when they're wielding their power to hurt others. I always end up pondering a chicken-or-egg scenario with powerful people like Cuomo. Were they craven, morally vacant, abusive pieces of poo poo who, absent power and influence, would wind up in the hands of the US carceral system, or did it start with an aide casually leaning over and mentioning they could help Cuomo "reinvest" some state resources into a pet project, and it's a straight shot downhill into "what, exactly, can i get away with now?" Did they always feel this entitled to step on people, or did the legions of sycophants that attached themselves to them in parasocial, celebrity politician relationships end up creating the monster?
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Aug 5, 2021 15:04
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Timeless Appeal posted:Well I think there are two things at play here. One, power in the way that Cuomo is discussing is not something that he ever didn't have. Cuomo is much like Trump in that he was born into his power. Yeah, I think we largely agree on that, and I surely was using a very limited scope of the term 'power' - though my interaction with power has generally been in relation to a politician having power (you may have read my awful story about a state-level democrat that I have an unfortunate blood relation to aiding and advancing the career of a pedophile rapist because that pedophile rapist was her son!) so that's kind of where I'm coming from - but yeah, definitely would say that it's hard to use Cuomo as an example on further reflection because in order to wonder "what if...?" you'd have to unravel more than just the electoral system of power. I like to hope that if Patricia Serpa, of Rhode Island's 27th District wasn't a sitting member of the RI House of Representatives, her pedophile rapist kid would be in prison rather than painting fire hydrants and getting a cushy state pension but...theoreticals gonna theoretical.
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Aug 5, 2021 16:47
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Timeless Appeal posted:Sorry I did and thank you for sharing it, but didn't connect it with your username. Sorry if anything in my post was insensitive on that front. Not at all! I actually found your response helpful in broadening my spectrum!
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Aug 5, 2021 17:00
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Yeah I wasn't gonna really say it but it's kind of weird that you would bring up Tara Reade in what appears to be the context of "she shouldn't have been doubted" (correct me if i'm wrong, though!), who only ever got much mainstream coverage on FOX news and independent media channels (that were immediately branded part of a Red-Brown alliance, haha consent printer go brrrt), and then turn around and go "surely you have some better context for this than some right wing rag/nutjob yes?" It's just re-packaging the same flak that the democrats use to protect their powerful.
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Aug 6, 2021 15:29
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Timeless Appeal posted:I don't think I'm being partisan. This isn't a Fox News Article or one of Clinton's rape victims who became a conservative. It's some transphobic fascist sympathizer nobody on twitter posting a photo with no context that could easily be Biden in mid-motion and applying a flippant take on it. Biden has been inappropriate at the very minimum with people and I believe he sexually assaulted at least one person, but just some random photo posted from some fascist nobody I think belittles the actual discourse and experience of those victims. And now we're arguing over sources, when it's abundantly clear that this is a pattern of behavior Biden has displayed for years and is easily verifiable by anyone with an internet connection and a basic understanding of how to use a search engine. This is exactly how the flak machine protects the powerful - instead of talking about their behavior, we end up talking about the behavior of the source. It's the same for any issue that the powerful don't want to deal with - be it "if you don't like the US military operating in Syria, you must be a Tucker watching Assad lover" while ignoring things like the factual OPCW report and make the story instead about who broke the story. Since we seem to largely agree that the picture, while it "could" be taken out of context, isn't actually that, this flak-providing derail doesn't need to live any more, unless we want to further distract from the issue that joe biden is a creepy touchy man?
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Aug 6, 2021 16:22
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Kalit posted:Bringing this derail in from the USnews thread for relevance. Lib and let die, since you had stated that you love Dore, what do you think about Jimmy Dore's misogynism and sexual harassing other(s)? I think that no one that wasn't in that room 10 or so years ago or whatever really knows what happened. What I do know, is that the TYT "newsroom" environment ten years ago isn't the same as the TYT "newsroom" environment today. It's like trying to compare Howard Stern to Keith Olbermann - it's just not the same content aimed at the same demographic. FWIW, I do think Jimmy's comment was inappropriate, I think it was inappropriate when he made it, and I think it'd be inappropriate in any newsroom - hell any environment today. Jimmy absolutely owed Ana the apology he gave her. For me, the issue is with motivation. If there wasn't a direct message history of Ana flat-out threatening to go public unless Jimmy stopped criticizing TYT, I would almost certainly find myself on the other side of this divide. Hell, I'm willing to even give Ana the benefit of "she sent a message she shouldn't have in a moment of anger/emotion/drunkenness" because, well, whom amongst us? But she made the deliberate signal that she was going to dig this issue up again, publicly, and use it to "crush" him unless Jimmy stopped criticizing her and TYT for their lack of journalistic integrity. I'd even be all for a formal investigation into the issue, Cuomo style! At least then we'd have something other than twitter fueds and youtube clout chasing to try and form an informed opinion with! As it is, we have two independent media outlets fighting it out with each other in nowhere but the court of public opinion, with their own organizational biases informing their own reporting on the issue.
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Aug 6, 2021 17:49
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Kalit posted:Thank you for the answer, even if I disagree with it, and sorry for pushing on this so much. I did edit my post and was just going to drop it, since I was being a petty rear end in a top hat as Terminal autist pointed out. Please don't ever think you can't call out my posting. I won't post anything here that I'm not comfortable expanding on or defending - and if there's a general consensus that I'm wrong, then I probably have a chance to do a growth!
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Aug 6, 2021 18:05
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Timeless Appeal posted:I am sympathetic to what you are saying, and generally speaking you should not out survivors. But if a child tells you that they were sexually assaulted, you should absolutely not keep it yourself and immediately try to get help for them. Depending on your profession, you may actually have a legal compulsion to report exactly the behavior that is being discussed here! Here in Florida (of all places lmao) we have mandatory reporter laws that if a child confesses to a teacher that they're being abused (sexually or otherwise), a teacher can face criminal penalty for not reporting it to CPS.
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Aug 8, 2021 01:07
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silicone thrills posted:It's this. Every time someone comes forward with their story and it involves anyone "important" the victim/survivor ends up hurt. The US has clearly set the precident. Yeah, it shouldn't be surprising to anyone at this point that people victimized by powerful people are often subjected to a faustian bargain of "go public and starve or bury it and survive" and it's a little gross to see this sort of macho bravado of "if i were the victim, i would simply..." nonsense just flippantly thrown out there.
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Oct 27, 2021 17:22
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Harvey Mantaco posted:The way people are polarized against parties at all costs, combined with the undermining of rape culture... I feel like you could release a literal video of you being raped with the senator smiling dead-straight at the camera and still get death threats and Tucker Carlson interviewing your grade 2 teacher about how you cheated on a mad minutes or whatever. I would make the argument that you're more likely to see your own interview segment on Tucker, while Rachel airs the grade 2 teacher interview, mostly as a way for Trustworth Media to point to you and say "well of course you're lying/have an agenda, you went on Tucker to talk about it!"
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Oct 27, 2021 20:21
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