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Would you be shocked if President grab-her-by-the-pussy is outed as a rapist tomorrow? And would you be shocked if those allegations were then found to be fabricated next week? There's always nebulous "signs" that seem obvious in hindsight, especially when characterised with a more "flexible" personal ethics than what's normal. But the allegations need to stand on their own legs as well. Or we could simply chuck legal procedure, cede to the court of public opinion (read: mob rule) and do only what's optically feasible.
According to reddit Trump is a rapist. Adjudicated civilly liable for rape or whatever phrasing they use. We're far past that in the minds of his opponents.
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As another user pointed out, Democracy is already "mob rule" and nothing will stop the Collins campaign and conservative media from repeating the allegations against him. And nothing will stop hesitant voters from changing their minds when they hear about it. This isn't a criminal court, this is an election. If you want to talk about "proper procedure" in the court of public opinion, then it should go both ways and the politico article should not have even been allowed.
It's like my government mandated friend issue, there is a fundamental different between the government organization and the private citizen/organization. The government can not (or at least should not) arrest you for the content of your speech, meanwhile I can kick you out of my house for any reason I want. In the same way the government shouldn't jail someone without due process and high standards of evidence, but I am free to judge you off whatever standard I please, including explicitly unfair and biased ones.
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Thee number of allegations that fell through against President grab-her-by-the-pussy is precisely why I would be shocked if Trump were outed as a rapist tomorrow. If there were strong, credible evidence of rape, it would have been raised by now. Lord knows it would have been much easier than burning the Democrat's own credibility via resorting to novel legal theories and banal hypocrisies.
But the reason for that shock is that convincing evidence tomorrow only come in the context of a long history of disproven or unsupported allegations yesteryear. If there is convincing evidence, I would be shocked for it to come out now, and not earlier in the better part of a decade of effort to destroy Trump.
By contrast, I am not shocked when a first-run would-be congress critter's dirty laundry starts to appear during their first run, precisely because it is their first run and they've never been subject to stricter public scrutiny before. With stricture scrutiny comes the low hanging fruits being easily noticed, and low hanging fruits give a starting point to find the less-obvious higher hanging fruits from the same tree.
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I hate to break it to you, but the method the US has for filling political offices relies substantially on public opinion, or 'mob rule', as you phrased it.
Criminal procedure requirements apply to criminal penalties only. Your partner may still dump you on evidence of infidelity which would not be conclusive enough for a jury to send you to the gallows, simply because there is no due process requirement for dumping a partner.
Likewise, there is no motion to suppress testimony in political campaigns, because not getting elected to the US Senate is not a violation of your fundamental rights. In the end, it is up to the sovereign to decide how much any allegations disqualify you or not.
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I'm personally of the opinion that Trump has probably had sexual encounters that would be considered rape by median 2020 peak woke values of such, however I don't think he's likely to have committed anything especially vile by standards of his immediate cultural standards. I'm sure Platner got laid a bunch for tweaking the right signals that'd kill it with a Tumblr chicklit enthusiast, but 'manly takechargey man' is a role that is always going to be dancing on the line of consent. Especially when consent can be assigned and retracted retroactively at any time for any reason
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No, and no, respectively, and that's the fault of his brag-about-sexual-assault behavior and of his attackers' throw-mud-and-see-what-sticks behavior, so neither of my "no"s is wrong in either the positive or normative sense.
Are there, though? Politician is a pretty awful job for people who aren't attracted to power, which might correlate with sexual force kinks and probably correlates with being willing to lie for power, but even vague signs aren't "always" there. It's not a wacky coincidence that we've been talking about Platner pretty exclusively before this final straw. Cory Booker might be a contributor to federal gridlock, but do you think he might be a rapist? John Cornyn might lie about how partisan his Supreme Court confirmation behavior was, but do you think he'd lie to frame someone for rape?
In this case in particular, we're in theory talking about a candidate who was head-hunted by party insiders, not somebody whose drive to power led him to start a campaign on his own initiative. If we're already widening the search that proactively, couldn't we just have found someone with no Nazi tattoos, no public statements of bloodlust, no reports of abuse from exes, no violations of wedding vows, and no accounts on creepy sites famed for underaged sexting? This is not actually a big ask! There are loads of normal people out there, some of whom would probably agree to run for Senator anyway!
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Shocked? No.
But Trump is vulgar, being a sex pest makes sense, rapist maybe less so but not shocking. This guy is HEINOUS. He bragged about having thoughts of raping men for dominance, like it makes more sense than not!
Vague, nebulous post-hoc signs are a problems but this guy is not that!
If you had to make a most Sus guy in a lab it would look like this guy.
I followed it up with another question.
You know why MeToo ran out of mileage?
The signal-to-noise ratio of the allegations was probably the worst we've ever seen at the time. Becky accuses Brad on twitter, incident happened somewhere in LA several years ago so no evidence exists, she was super scared so no police complaint was filed, you know the drill. And she's definitely not lying because "you don't lie about these things and it's hard to lie about it rape".
Except, it's the digital age. It's never been easier to lie! People lie, casually and often, about far more outlandish things than SA. And the online mob will reliably follow her word to lynch Brad.
You can't reason with the mob, why allow them to get involved at all?
There are people who want Trump gone, we know that. We have precedent within the decade for smear campaigns (see Russiagate) to delegitimise his Presidency. An unverified rape charge at a politically critical moment? Is that not Sus?
You're confusing MeToo with the campus rape allegations. I'm not aware of single MeToo incident that involved a single individual making accusations about an isolated instance of sexual misconduct that happened decades ago. The closest was Brett Kavanaugh, but even that isn't a great instance because it was a presumed attempted rape and it didn't prevent his Supreme Court confirmation. The New York Times did a postmortem in the fall of 2018 documenting over 200 incidents, the overwhelming majority of which involved some kind of workplace harassment. The perpetrators often admitted the accusations or at least to some kind of vague wrongdoing "I apologize for any inappropriate behavior...", and most of the cases involved multiple accusers, witnesses, or some other kind of corroboration.
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Two things can be true at the same time.
MeToo involved a bunch of bullshit.
This guy is by his own uncontested words a huge shit bag in multiple ways, including in ways that would make you think he's the likely sort to commit sexual assault.
The contested stuff is just a cherry on top.
Additional process information includes the fact that this stuff was out their for months and then held back by various individuals, it wasn't fabricated right now, and the fact that the people who vetted him found and knew about a lot of this and admitted it.
It's blowing my mind that people are defending this guy.
Progressives are defending this guy because Platner's just the top image in hello_human_resources.jpg
I defend this guy because I want a candidate (who has politics I don't even agree with) to win an election regardless of how much female-privilege-associated (re: "consent violations") dirt appears, so that people stop listening to women when they invoke it.
We are not the same.
(What your mind is being blown by are conservatives who don't understand this, so they're all busy debating whether it was or wasn't consensual because that's the framework they use to Protect Women. They don't understand that the entire concept of "consent" was destructive from the start and that women don't need that protection in an equal world.)
I mean you realize you are supporting a guy who supposedly said he would love an excuse to rape men, right?
In today's instance of "Worst Person You Know Made a Funny Post"...
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Yes?
Let's make sure I got this right - you don't care how bad a person he is, even if he was Hitler you'd fine with that because you want someone to survive a sexual assault scandal regardless of how abominable or real it is, did I get that right?
I'd assert that this may be satisfying and at the same time the opposite of what you'd want to do if your plan was to alter how the electorate responds to these things.
Oh no, "alter" isn't really the right word here.
You can't alter how the electorate responds (re: Boomers), you can just out-vote the concerns of that sector, doesn't matter what they think after that. Altering how the electorate responds is much like how the scientific community alters its consensus- one funeral at a time.
You misunderstand: this is the reform I support, because right now they're all false, and I want the people who are too stupid to realize that (and/or think it's good that sex assault scandals are valid heckler's vetoes) to lose.
So I guess that means I think those people are... literally worse than Hitler.
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I mean I agree it's sus and this wouldn't likely be platformed as enthusiastically if it wasn't otherwise convenient to do so, but also Platner's whole existence is prettymuch 'overly horny man who tiptoes on the line of consent' and with that established it's hardly a massive stretch that he's fallen across the foul line at some point. Especially with modern conceptions of consent where it's entirely vibe-based and can be switched on and off retroactively whenever suits.
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