I think it certainly has tipped over. It’s now at the stage where logic has fled and hysteria has taken over. You no longer have to have evidence and there is an assumption of guilt rather than innocence. A single random social media post is considered “proof” that a person is a predator and should be drummed out of Hollywood (see George Takei).
The problem with this is like everything else where hysteria takes over. The real problem cases get lost amid the flood of noise.
The end result of always believe the victim.
Why is a random accusation of Takai less believable than one against Al Franken? Why is a dozen women, dozens over the years accusing Clinton of everything from harassment to rape less believable than three or four against more Roy Moore.
What’s coming out is that it’s actually believe the narrative, and if it doesn’t fit then throw it out.
Hell, people still defend Polanski.
But at the same time, multiple stories are coming out about staffers knowing not to be alone with Conyers. The dude has been rattling around the Capital for 55 years. Really?
That’s the crucial thing, and the thing that gets missed most often.
I don’t know anything about Al Franken, but if it’s a single accusation then it should have the same weight as a single accusation against George Takei.
I would say Clinton is on a par with Trump, not quite as bad as Weinstein. All 3 of them have multiple accusers telling a very similar story and I think the narrative is compelling.
Kevin Spacey and Roy Moore I think are worse because their victims were minors.
One was admitted to, sort of, and the other categorically denied. One being a couple decades ago, with further rumored behavior since then, while Moore is two or three accusers from 40 years ago. The comments that he was banned from the mall have been refuted by multiple sources, and the cop making comments backs off them when asked to go on the record. She went from “We were asked to keep him away from the cheerleaders” to “There were rumors about him”.
Somehow, no one can come up with something recent on him. I’ll submit this, in his early thirties he hit on 16-19 year old girls, icky, but not illegal. Did he grab one that lied about her age, or did he not bother to ask? I don’t know. The pick up method also seems odd, with the others that came up he asked the parent’s permission and was very open about the relationship, picking them up from football games and the mall and dining in public, while with this girl no one ever actually saw them together.
I don’t like it, the whole things seems odd, but I don’t live in Alabama, so it’s a decision I don’t have to make.
With Franken, it’s a picture and a couple people so far, maybe three.
And it turns out NPR, NBC, CBS, and who the hell else has been hiding these allegations for ages. The very people telling us how horrible we all are are the worst examples of what they hate.
So, it’s like SETI, but non voluntary and makes money.
dakboy, it was Mitchel Musso. I think he was also dropped from Walt Disney Records.
Regarding Garrison Keillor, MikeP’s got it right. This is what Keillor says happened:
“I put my hand on a woman’s bare back,” he told the Star Tribune by e-mail minutes after MPR’s statement. “I meant to pat her back after she told me about her unhappiness and her shirt was open and my hand went up it about six inches. She recoiled. I apologized. I sent her an email of apology later and she replied that she had forgiven me and not to think about it. We were friends. We continued to be friendly right up until her lawyer called.”
If that is the only thing that he did and there were no other incidents with that one person or any other people, especially since Minnesota Public Radio’s statement says “Based on what we currently know, there are no similar allegations involving other staff.”, is the following a reasonable reaction?
As a result, Garrison has pretty much shut down his website. Parts of it can be found in the Internet Archive, but who knows what’s been lost.
Another part of the statement says, “We want a workplace where anyone who experiences unwanted behavior feels comfortable in reporting concerns to MPR. Discrimination, harassment, retaliation or other inappropriate behaviors will not be tolerated.” If whatever the “continuing investigation” turns up is just this one instance of a momentary situation that supposedly was resolved with an apology that was accepted, wouldn’t all of what’s happened in the last two days be retaliation itself?
Right now, I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around how much could be, and has been, lost. if there’s nothing else and it’s all over something exceedingly minor, I don’t have any more words to express how I feel at this point.
From the way I’ve read it it sounds like her shirt was gaping at the back and he accidentally went under the shirt instead of over it. He apologized, she accepted it, and they stayed friends until her lawyer called him a month later.
The head hunters will keep counting coup until they get too many scalps like this one appears to be and the backlash will be vicious.
Conyers’ lawyer is like explain to me the difference between Franken and Conyers… and I’m like really? One engages in mildly inappropriate behavior and the other strips in front of women. Both are wrong but one is much more wrong than the other.
Running around mad at yourself all the time makes you angry at everyone as well. Not being able to forgive yourself for the smallest thing makes it near impossible to forgive anyone else.
over the last few years I’ve gotten harder and harder on myself on the slightest little thing. This makes me, someone notorious among my old friends for being happy and impossible to piss off, a heartbeat from blowing up. It’s like anger by wire. Now, it’s not like I do anything about my own issues besides get disappointed and pissed off.
When my daughter does something, it pours into my boiling pot and it spills. So even if I’m not really mad about it, or yelling at her, it all comes out. I don’t feel any more mad than i already am, but that’s become background noise to me, so i don’t notice my tone or what I’m saying.
I’m not an ogre, but it makes me very unpredictable. Apparently I’m Dr. Banner, and I’m always angry. No one knows why I’m angry, but they have to deal with it.
So I have to learn Grace. How to forgive myself instead of shoving everything into a box. The behaviors that make me angry aren’t earth shattering, I forgot to change the headlight again, I didn’t switch the laundry, I spent an hour reading as a break instead of half an hour. Stuff like that, it should be easy to deal with, but part of me since i became a step father started demanding perfection, and when perfection wasnt delivered got the cat o’ nine tails out.
Thankfully it’s not that i beat anyone or rage uncontrollably around the house, but I’m not comfortable to be around.
@Woodman I empathize. Let me know if you find a way to deal with that. I used to find that spending some time alone in the woods helped, but my physical fitness doesn’t really allow that much anymore.
Part of the issue is that any activity has the potential to add to the issue. As mistakes happen doing anything. But I’m looking to my woodworking to help.
So, if the old song “It takes two” was written by somebody disnumeric, but polite and with good grammar, would the lyrics go:
“It takes three baby, just you and me”
I can be like that, too. I’m hard on myself, so then I have a short fuse with others, generally those I’m closest to - family and forever friends. Sometimes I have to remind myself to not be an exacting asshole, and that most of the little stuff doesn’t matter.
(But would it kill people to close the utensils drawer once in a while? Seriously.)
Edit - or to turn off the light in the bathroom.
$ookwife, is that you? 
Also have the same problem here, we tend not to close the utensils drawer, and $ookwife will moan about it.
At least we are starting to close it, so periods of moaning should decrease.
Mrs. The Really Horrible almost closes the bathroom cabinets.She’ll push them about a half-inch from fully closed, and leave them like that. It makes me nuts. If she leaves them like that, I just open them fully and leave them like that. Eventually she gets the hint and closes them. It’s our little dance and I know all the moves.
Argh, someone in Italy got into my netflix account and was watching movies in Spanish. Changed my email on the account, and the password. They even created another profile on the account called Hack63k or something.
Annoying.
I just lost my entire afternoon to a “free” headlight bulb replacement.
So this weekend I discovered my right side low beam was dead. Again. It’s a massive problem with 2010-2012 Subaru Outbacks, to the point where they’re covering them on a 10 year extended warranty. I call in the morning, they say it’s an emergency fix and bring it in during walk in hours and they’ll fit it in between appointments.
Pull in at 1:30, try to go to 5e service desk but the guy at the garage entrance stops me and tells me we take care of it there. Gives me a ticket, tells ,e to go inside. I go in, past the service desk who just watched me pull in, and go to the waiting area.
4:15 rolls around. Literally everyone in the waiting area has arrived after me. More than 100% turnover since I’ve been here. Service writer comes out to tell someone else their car is done, I ask her what’s going on with my car. She leaves to check, comes back and tells me they didn’t even know I was there. The guy who checked me in was supposed to tell me to turn in the ticket at the desk but never did.
I took today off for other reasons, this just popped up over the weekend. Regardless, I’ve lost half of my vacation day because this guy didn’t give me the right instructions and no one else bothered to talk to the customer walking past the desk or sitting in the waiting room for 3 hours.
Arg, that sucks, @dakboy. I don’t go to dealerships when I can avoid it, but the past several times, I make it a point to get the card of anyone who “helps” me. Case in point - the week I got my truck, a pressure relief valve (or something like that there) in the gas tank got stuck, so toward the end of my first tank of gas (provided by the dealership, I had not even opened the fuel door yet), the gas tank kind of imploded. Probably related to a brand new 2015 truck sitting on the lot for probably well over six months until I bought it in May 2016, but still, very freaky. So, I got stuck with a truck that didn’t want to run on Sunday on the way to church with my wife right next to me. Yeah, you can imagine what a pleasant situation that was. Ya might say I was a bit testy. Anyway, Ford’s new vehicle roadside assistance sent a tow truck. He pulled my truck onto his flatbed. Just to be paranoid, we went to the gas station 150 yards away and put $3.00 in. Tank was still looking crushed, so we took it to the dealership less than a half mile away. They don’t have anyone there but a guard on Sundays, who let us in and let us drop it. I went by the next day to talk to my salesman and the service advisor. I got the advisor’s card and the salesman gave me a different, also brand new truck as a loaner. Even with the sales guy breathing down the advisor’s neck every day (likely twice a day), we didn’t have a firm update on Wednesday. At that point, I called the main office, got transferred to the service manager, and asked what the heck was going on - told him that even the sales guy was getting the runaround. I finally found out, later that afternoon, that they had ordered a new tank, fuel pump, purge valve assembly - basically everything tank adjacent and fuel related. I never got confirmation, but I suspected that after someone got their asses chewed out, someone else was instructed to ‘borrow’ the parts off another new truck and install them on mine. AFAIK, all the fuel system bits down there were identical between 2015 and 2016s. I’m also guessing that the prospect of me driving their brand new, 16 miles on the odometer truck up to Dallas over the coming weekend prompted the sales guy to motivate the service guys.
Apparently, I needed to vent. It was a rough day today.
Some writers have described how their characters talk to them. J. Michael Straczynski said he was working on an assassination scene for an episode and it freaked him out when one of his characters told him, “I have to do it.” I think JMS said that when that sort of thing happens, the writer better listen.
Well, if a writer comes up with an idea for their story but the reaction from the character is, “What kind of hack writer came up with that?”, you know you’re in trouble.
I typically only go to a dealer for warranty work; I have a good mechanic within walking distance of my office, and my tire shop does free rotation & balancing on tires bought from them as well as being full-service, so I’ll have them change oil when tires get rotated.
I hadn’t been to this dealership in three years, which the service writer tried to use to make me feel better about not understanding how their new process worked. Oh, but good news! They did another recall they found on my car while they were at it (which I knew about, just hadn’t bothered going in for because it wasn’t a high priority issue)! It felt a little condescending, to be honest.