CatBus

Warbler said:

CatBus said:
I have no idea if Gorsuch did something inappropriate in high school.

I’m sure he did do something inappriopriate…

What makes you so certain? Had there been some sort of accusation made against him that I don’t know about?

I was talking about the lightness of the term “inappropriate”. “Inappropriate” is a term for laughing during a serious event, or wearing shorts on a cold day, or failing to remember an anniversary. I’m sure he did that, because he’s human. Ever met a human who never did anything inappropriate? What about a high school boy?

“Inappropriate” is an extraordinarily minimizing term to use for sexual assault. Criminal works better. Monstrous also fits the bill pretty well. What I’m saying is I’m pretty sure Gorsuch was not a criminal monster in high school, but I’m equally sure he was inappropriate… and talking about inappropriateness is very much beside the point. Bank robbery isn’t “inappropriate withdrawal of funds”. It’s a crime.

Mrebo said:

Kavanaugh’s friend apparently did swear under penalty of perjury.

It was a letter to the committee, not a sworn affidavit. There are no penalties for lying in a simple letter, regardless of the identity of the addressee. Well, okay, there’s wire fraud, but you know what I mean.

EDIT: Looks like Judge’s letter included some text at the end about “I do this under penalty of felony” which I guess sounded more formal to him or something, but it’s not a legally meaningful statement. And if he consulted a lawyer (he did in general, but not sure about this particular text), he’d know that. There’s no penalty.

Ford’s friend recalls no such party, not sure why that would change.

Under penalty of perjury, lots of people change their tune. And with a skilled interviewer, useful minor corroborating facts can still be gleaned even from reluctant witnesses, ones that might have been intentionally or accidentally left out of a sworn affidavit.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve read that Ford never named Kavanaugh until his nomination. By degrees, that’s very late in the game. I think her husband says she used his name with him, but apparently not in front of the therapist. She only claimed an assault previously. It doesn’t corroborate her specific claims terribly well. Certainly, we’d want something more than that.

I think you just corrected yourself a few sentences later, so I’ll just let that go. But yes, trauma victims remember some things explicitly and some things for crap, that’s the whole hippocampus discussion again, and it’s extremely common for sexual assault victims to delay reporting. And usually that’s where it begins and ends… when there aren’t other witnesses to help fill in gaps.

I have no idea if Gorsuch did something inappropriate in high school.

I’m sure he did do something inappriopriate… but I doubt he did something criminal. We’re not talking about whoopie cushions under the headmaster’s cushion here.

It does appear that Gorsuch was a more buttoned-up young man.

He could have been a drummer for a Death Metal band. It’s not about how many piercings he had, it’s if he violated any laws. Buttoned-up young men are no less likely to commit crime than any other young men. But they might not be caught as much.

EDIT: And don’t forget the Democrats filibustered Gorsuch, which is less than “sailing.” I guess he was so bad that it’s good they didn’t hold off on filibustering, eh?

Filibustering is sailing when it’s toothless. The point of filibustering is to express extreme political difference, not as a means of investigating criminal acts–if you want to do the latter, a hearing is a good place to start. So the Dems effectively said they disagreed very strongly with Gorsuch’s politics and gave no indication he committed any crimes. That’s not really a surprise.

Mrebo said:

Impossible to know if Ford’s allegation against Kavanaugh is true. Partisans are going to believe what they want.

Without calling witnesses, that’s certainly the likely outcome. That’s why I bemoaned how little time was spent on the details that could steer things away from he-said/she-said.

All other named witnesses have no recollection of any such behavior or events.

What people say to the press and what they say under penalty of perjury are sometimes two very different things. If he wants to say that under oath, that’s fine. Give him that opportunity.

one uncorroborated claim of assault

Corroboration has degrees–parts can be corroborated if not the whole. You can corroborate that the claim predates the nomination, for example, so while the public revelation may be political, the underlying claim certainly isn’t. There’s also a witness that I believe should be called to testify who may or may not provide more corroborating detail. I’d describe it as one partly-corroborated claim with a yet-to-be-questioned witness, and other uncorroborated claims. YMMV.

It’s not a good look for anyone, but this is apparently how our government operates.

Weird how under such a dysfunctional, dramatic environment, Gorsuch sailed through the same Senate recently without even a mention of him assaulting anyone. It may just be equally possible that government always works like it did for Gorsuch, but only when you studiously avoid assaulting people.

It’s possible that one or two GOP Senators defect and Kavanaugh doesn’t get confirmed but I also think that’s unlikely.

Right there with you.

Well, it looks like I was wrong, and happily so. Those weird new unsubstantiated anonymous assault accusations made no appearance at the hearing AFAICT. Glad they didn’t make the cut for Senate hearings, I suppose they’re strictly for the tabloids. On the plus side, I feel Kav and Ford both got to say what they needed to say, but on the downside, far too much of this boiled down to a he-said/she-said. Far too little attention was paid to witnesses (Judge wasn’t even asked to testify, which seemed very improper for something this serious IMO), very little attention was paid to other corroboration (Ford’s discussion of the assault with friends prior to the nomination was mentioned only briefly), and the failure to include other accusers did not seem adequately explained at all IMO.

Will it make a difference? Maybe. By not going full InfoWars*, they may have saved Murkoski’s vote. But I don’t think any of the others were in danger, so he’s in like… hmm, maybe Flynn’s not a good name in this context. They may have also caused themselves some midterm troubles, though. Kav didn’t step on any legal landmines AFAICT, but he sure didn’t endear himself to anyone new.

* Notwithstanding Kav’s attempt to pin the blame for this on the Clintons, who clearly must have used the same time machine for coaching Ford to talk about the assault prior to Kav’s nomination that they used to place birth notices in the Hawaii newspapers for Obama prior to his election.

Warbler said:

They probably want to push this now because who knows how much more difficult it may be if they have to start over again and maybe try to confirm a conservative after the election.

They have plenty of time to confirm a conservative before the election (especially if they keep with the rushed schedules), and they can even confirm a conservative AFTER the election but before the new Senators are seated (oh, we lost our majority in the election? so sad, let’s confirm!). And either way, pretty much every most likely Senate projection shows Republicans gaining seats this cycle, which will make confirmations even easier for the next two years.

I don’t use EasySup anymore, and I’m pretty happy with the replacement scripts I’ve got now. Especially because they are fully scriptable/unattended for large file batches. There’s a lot of custom P3PO-specific stuff in there that would be pretty much impossible to replicate without some similarly purpose-made software.

But in other news, I’m in the process of considering switching Japanese translations, and IIRC I think you have some sort of experience with Japanese? Basically the versions we have now are the original theatrical subtitles (1977, 1980, 1983), which were a little rushed and maybe not the most accurate translations. But we successfully got them in text format, so we ran with it. Later, a new dub and subtitles were made in 93 (before the SE’s) which I believe are more accurate to the spoken English. I now have a text copy of the SE subtitles, which are mostly the same as the 93 ones, and with a little work I think I can do this.

I found a website where someone is comparing the subs (the original ones we have) to the dubs (which more-or-less match the later 93 subs), and it seems a significant improvement in a few places.

http://nihonshock.com/2009/12/star-wars-quotes-in-japanese/

If you know some Japanese, would you agree this seems like a good change?

Here’s how it seems to be going down tomorrow. They are actually going to try to go for confirmation on schedule. No withdrawal, no three-day delay for FBI investigation of newly-revealed materials. Full steam ahead.

We have several people now with stories of Kav engaging in sexual assault, with varying degrees of witnesses, evidence that the stories were shared years ago (not just invented for this confirmation), sworn affidavits, and so on. And Kav perjuring himself at every opportunity doesn’t help his case. He couldn’t even manage a fluff interview on Fox without verifiably lying about his underage drinking.

They can’t turn any of that off, but they can increase the noise in an attempt to drown out the signal. Now suddenly at the last minute, in addition to these women with plausible stories, corroboration, and names, it looks like we suddenly have a new raft of even more sensational stories–but anonymous this time, with no paper trail, no names, no nothing, and trivial to simply deny. And two men have volunteered to the committee that they assaulted Dr. Ford instead of Kav (because not only could that mistaken identity thing be for real, but being assaulted by two guys makes it un-possible to be assaulted by a third…it’s a little-known medical fact, and, oh yeah, people jump up and confess to sexual assault all the time when they’re not even under suspicion). Presumably, the idea is to have the bulk of the hearing’s time devoted to unsubstantiated phantom assaults everyone knows didn’t happen, hoping that the other ones with witnesses and corroboration become less believable by association. Or maybe they’ll run out of time before they have the chance to discuss them at all.

It’s brutally cynical and transparent. And it can work because it doesn’t even have to convince a single person. It just allows the Senators to say with a straight face after-the-fact “Who could possibly have known four of the seventeen assaults discussed at the hearing were for real? Most of them seemed so farfetched, so we voted to confirm.” It also shows who’s driving this, and how desperately they want it–if more than one Republican Senator steps out of line and this vote fails, you can bet they’re getting primaried and worse. And it’s just bizarre–there are tons of extremely conservative justices who wouldn’t have any assaults in their background–the Senate just confirmed one last year for crying out loud. No, it’s not just any super-conservative judge Trump wants, because he could (and did) get that quite easily. It’s Kavanaugh in particular he wants, and he’s pulling out all the stops to make sure it happens, public opinion and midterms be damned.

I can’t see this strategy sitting at all well with Murkowski, so I think she’s a “No” vote at this point. But there’d have to be another, and I don’t think my second-choice candidate Flake will do it, so it squeaks by.

People can usually tell I’ve got PMS before I announce it.

PM sent.

Old news:

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2017/07/19/john-mccain-blood-clot-james-comey-hearing/485937001/

New news:

Trump holds an official press conference today for the first time in over a year and a half.

Watch this press conference for about five minutes to see the connection… but it’s not for the faint of heart.

EDIT: Nevermind, he’s totally not gibbering uncontrollably on live TV. He is so stable and undeniably connected to reality that he should sit down and do that interview with Mueller right now. Right. Now.

Mea culpa is a tough thing for anyone to say, but you’d think it’d be easier if you were already pretty fluent in Latin.

moviefreakedmind said:

It wouldn’t even matter if Kavanaugh admitted to doing these things, Republicans would still support him. They wouldn’t care just like they didn’t care about Trump admitting to sexual assault.

Republican support in general, yes. But it’s 51 particular Republicans that matter. Among that number, we have one with a record of standing up to pressure (Murkowski), one with a record of antagonizing Trump verbally, if not with votes (Flake), and one with a record of being a principled maverick a few years back and recently selling out for no particular reason (Collins). If two of those three were on board, Kav would already be confirmed. There’s a slim chance Murkowski and Flake will hold out. There’s even a chance Flake has no intention of voting for Kav, but is dangling the possibility so that this process drags out and causes maximum political damage to Trump. But my money’s on eventual confirmation too, even with a positive paternity test on an underage victim from last year. Murkowski’s 50/50 though.

And even if he isn’t confirmed, he’ll become a cause célèbre among the sort of conservatives who use the term “Borked” to refer to decent, qualified justices who get screwed by politics, even though they were merely the DOJ Hatchet Man who helped obstruct justice by not having enough scruples to refuse Nixon’s orders for the Saturday Night Massacre like his immediate two predecessors. Well, okay, they tend to leave off that part of his resume.

Collipso said:

dooku became dookan because dooku would sound like ‘do cu’, which means ‘from the asshole’, so yeah.

It has a similar problem in English, but they didn’t change it for us 😕

PM sent.

PM sent.

Warbler said:

Collipso said:

most countries do at this point in time.

in democracies there are ways to solve problems without resorting to an actual revolution.

The discussion was triggered by the mention of upcoming challenges to the Voting Rights Act under the new court. I’m not sure large swaths of this country qualified as functional democracies prior to the VRA, and I see no reason to believe they’d qualify as such after it’s (hypothetically) struck down.

That said, I think the (remaining bits of the) VRA will survive, unless Trump is able to also replace Roberts or a moderate at some point in the future. But if he does, it’s toast.

The thing is, I think Roberts can be counted on to protect the parts of the Voting Rights Act he didn’t already gut, so it’s not hopeless. Civil Rights Act could see trouble though.

IMO Round 1 is certain to overturn both Obergefell and Roe. Round 2 is going to be centered on overturning Griswold, striking down the Civil Rights Act, and the remainder of the Voting Rights Act – and we’ll be counting on Justice Roberts to hold the line there. Yeah, that Justice Roberts. A Republican-dominated court we’ve lived with for decades (might actually be over a century, not sure). This court would be different.

Make that two anecdotes, quite possible there’s some data behind that too somewhere. Guilting yourself into suppression of your own urges can lead to at least considering a life in the church, as a means of keeping a lid on it. IIRC Dan Savage was once a seminarian – had he stuck with it, English speakers may have still been cobbling together several words just to simply say santorum.

I just checked out the 2-disc version of this, and it’s already my new go-to version of FOTR:EE. Previously I’d used You_Too’s blanket color correction, but there were some shot-specific issues in that, and most notably, it turned Merry’s waistcoat orange. I’d seen other attempts that managed the shot-specific issues better, but they seemed pretty subjective/haphazard in their correction choices overall. This one seems to be a great balance of handling the varying correction needs through the film, while sticking closely to a consistent, objective reference. And Merry’s waistcoat is yellow again 😉

Great work!

Not to mention that quite a lot of abusers were themselves abused as children. They may very well have been abused in a church themselves, and while most of the abused may have felt repelled by or conflicted about the church, they may have felt even more drawn to it.

I’m sure some mugger somewhere has attempted the “they attacked me just because I ascribed to a controversial, offensive pro-mugging viewpoint” defense. I’m sure I could spare as much sympathy for them.

IMO there are three varieties of Nazis: people who have been directly involved in genocide, people who aspire to be directly involved in genocide, and people who aspire to facilitate/be accessories to genocide. I don’t have much issue with any of those categories getting punched. And if they can’t be described in those terms, they’re probably not a Nazi.

Warbler said:

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

I’m no fan of religion (well, except the FSM). However, is the abuse rate any higher in the catholic church than in other religions? Or even when compared to large secular organizations? I haven’t seen any such statistics, and I wonder if it is just an unfortunate aspect of humanity in general.

FSM?

Flying Spaghetti Monster. IIRC he has difficulty keeping his noodly appendage to himself.

Welcome back.