Wouldn’t a history of alcoholism be a disqualifying factor in of itself?
Not if it is passed history. People have been known to have a problem with alcohol and overcome it later on. Remember you are talking about a history of extremely drinking when he was a teenager. I have heard no one say that he still has a drinking problem. Does extreme drinking necessarily = alcoholism?
I drank heavily during the 4 years I was in college and then pretty much stopped outside occasional social gatherings. Never blacked out, but did get thoroughly wasted on many occasions and it definitely altered my behavior.
It’s entirely possible Kavanaugh did what Ford says he did if he was a heavy drinker. However, labeling him an alcoholic because of heavy college drinking only shows that the person applying the label has no idea what alcoholism is—or is simply using it as a smear to disqualify him or sully his character.
How possible do you think it is that someone could sexually assault someone and totally completely forget it due to extreme drunkenness?
Very possible. I had friends who were heavier drinkers than I was and I’d tell them stories the next day about shit they did or said and they wouldn’t remember.
But we are not just talking ordinary shit people do while drunk. We are talking about sexual assault. Any of them commit a sexual assault and not remember it the next day?
I think Jay put it well, but I also found this article that explains how that might be the case.
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/09/27/32994451/i-believe-her-and-him
Both, I think, could be correct.
It is entirely plausible that a drunk Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge pushed Christine Blasey into a room, tortured her, and, soon after, forgot all about it. One of the other people who were allegedly at the house that day, Ford’s friend Leland, has said that she doesn’t remember the party or the assault either. And why would she? Ford says she didn’t tell anyone about the alleged attack until years later. For Leland, it would have been just another summer day.
And this, I think, explains Kavanaugh’s insistence that the attack didn’t happen as well. He’s not lying; he really just doesn’t think this attack happened. For Ford, it was an attempted rape that would haunt her for years. For Kavanaugh, it was fucking around, being a teenager, not a violent assault. How could two people have such different reactions to the same event? As the New York Times reported this week, while trauma is frequently seared into our memories, neuroscience research suggests that “there are scenarios in which someone could have committed an assault and yet also have almost no memory of it. If an assailant attaches little significance to an assault—for instance, if he doesn’t consider it an assault—his brain may only weakly encode details of the encounter.”
That, I think, is what happened: She experienced an assault that he didn’t realize he was committing. Ignorance, of course, does not make his actions okay. In fact, it’s almost more damning that two young men could be so cavalier with a girl’s body without even realizing their actions weren’t just harmful, but criminal. It’s a dark mark on us all that something so significant to a woman could be so easily forgotten by a man, but that is the world we live in. When Kavanaugh says the attack never took place, that’s because, for him, it did not. What is traumatic for her is, for him, less than nothing. This doesn’t mean Kavanaugh shouldn’t be punished for his actions, but it could help explain why he doesn’t remember them.
Granted, this is just conjecture, we have no idea what really happened.