Christopher Columbus’s spirit of determination & adventure has provided inspiration to generations of Americans. On #ColumbusDay, we honor his remarkable accomplishments as a navigator, & celebrate his voyage into the unknown expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. https://t.co/Mg3dxRfPuN
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 8, 2018
I’m with you Amy https://t.co/OA32dUrKfs
— David Crosby (@thedavidcrosby) October 7, 2018
Typically such cases occur when a vulnerable individual seeks help from a psychotherapist for a commonly occurring psychological problem such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and so on. At this stage, the client has no conscious memories of ever being the victim of childhood sexual abuse and is likely to firmly reject any suggestion of such abuse. To a particular sort of well-meaning psychotherapist, however, such denial is itself evidence that the abuse really did occur....For contrast, here's WaPo yesterday: "The junk science Republicans used to undermine Ford and help save Kavanaugh."
During therapy, and often as a result of "memory recovery" techniques such as hypnotic regression and guided imagery, the client may gradually develop clear and vivid memories of abuse having taken place, typically at the hands of parents and other family members.
On the evidence of a huge amount of well-controlled research, we can now be confident that these memory recovery techniques are highly likely to give rise to false memories – apparent memories for events that never took place.
Mara Mather, a professor at the University of Southern California, has performed laboratory studies in which volunteers are given electric shocks or subjected to loud noises while they look at a set of symbols — to find out which ones they remember while their brains are flooded with the same chemicals released during trauma.IN THE COMMENTS: Michael K said: "I initially thought she had recovered memories but I have come to the conclusion that she is lying."
“I guess the Republicans have been debating why does she forget getting home, but that sounds very plausible," she said. “It focuses the brain on whatever stands out at that moment. The things that are not standing out are even more ignored.”
Like other researchers, she could not recall a single case of a sexual assault victim misremembering a known attacker — save for rare instances in which people, often children, were coached into falsely accusing friends and family members....
Okay. Maybe I don't hate them, reading these comments here made think that it might have something about the demand and expectations of people around me. Or probably because my Facebook timeline is full of children and babies since people my age are already starting their own families-- which makes my annoyance even worse. But in my head I'm like "Guys, stop it, I'll be polite and like your photo just so you don't think I'm mean but your babies aren't cute. :("I have the perfect "Friends" clip for that:
Of course, I feel bad about my distaste for babies.
A black-and-white Polaroid was swapped in for a standard headshot.... By early Monday, more than a million Instagram users had registered their approval.A million? That's not impressive when you consider that Swift has 112 million followers on Instagram.
By characterizing the midterms as “an overall struggle for protecting human rights and dignity” rather than a partisan grudge match, Swift is speaking effectively to young people who have less fealty to the party structure, said William Fotter, the vice president of the University of Arizona Democrats. “Young people are less party-oriented and more issue-oriented,” said the 21-year-old political science and international relations major. “If Taylor Swift is able to convince millennials that their votes matter, that could make a huge difference,” he said....What if the young people are inspired by Swift to vote but not for Democrats? This danger is squirreled away deep in the article (which is so insanely padded that it would be weird if normal readers got this far, but it's the most interesting part):
Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union scolded her for threatening to sue a California blogger who accused the singer of being associated with white supremacy. And in an editorial, the Guardian called her an “envoy for Trump’s values.”...Here's what the Guardian wrote last November:
[Swift and Trump both have] their adept use of social media to foster a diehard support base; their solipsism; their laser focus on the bottom line; their support among the “alt-right”.As for those other 2 WaPo articles, what Rose McGowan said about entertainment industry #MeToo supporters was:
Swift’s songs echo Mr Trump’s obsession with petty score-settling in their repeated references to her celebrity feuds, or report in painstaking detail on her failed romantic relationships.... The message is quintessentially Trumpian: everyone is out to get me – but I win anyway....
[N]otably her much-publicised “squad” of female models, actors and musicians is largely thin, white and wealthy. In a well-publicised Twitter exchange with rapper Nicki Minaj, she treated the discussion of structural racism as not only incomprehensible, but a way to disempower white people such as herself....
“I just think they’re douchebags.... They’re not champions. I just think they’re losers. I don’t like them.... I know these people, I know they’re lily-livered, and as long as it looks good on the surface, to them, that’s enough.”As for Melania and the pith helmet — despite the headline, the actual article has some depth and nuance. I'll highlight the details that really ruin the hat-based attack on Melania:
In 1994, The Washington Post’s Phil McCombs reported that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton “appeared in a pith helmet, looking vaguely like a North Vietnamese Army officer” on a visit to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park....So are pith helmets properly called — as in the WaPo headline — "a symbol of colonialism"? If you want to say yes, you'll have to attack James Meredith!
[P]ith helmets are worn by motorcycle taxi drivers in Hanoi, as well as police officers in Cameroon and Peru. In the U.S., postal workers wear pith helmets as part of their uniforms on exceptionally rainy or sunny days, and the U.S. Marine Corps’ marksmanship coaches wear them at shooting ranges....
In 1966, the civil rights activist James Meredith marched through Mississippi wearing a pith helmet while encouraging African Americans to vote. Charles W. “Hoppy” Adams, the legendary black DJ at WANN in Annapolis, Md., wore a pith helmet during live appearances in the 1950s and 1960s... And the rapper Andre 3000 of OutKast wore a straw pith helmet with a bow tie and overalls on MTV’s Total Request Live in 2006.
Orlando Arcia & @KeonDDBroxton go back-to-back in the 9th to extend the lead to 6-0! #OurCrewOurOctober pic.twitter.com/1OAf8NgOm5
— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) October 7, 2018
After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.I say careless because "rivers of blood" is a lot of blood to flow out of "women" — which women? how many? — and yet they only "all but slit their wrists"? So what did they do in this metaphor, to produce all that blood, if they didn't open wrist veins?
With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who held out until the bitter end.So Murkowski counts as one of the good ones (despite the pairing with Daines). And Susan Collins, despite her beautifully brilliant speech, is deemed to have fought against the position she forthrightly took. Then, she "caved." She gave in to the men.
These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job.That's awfully presumptuous. The vote on Kavanaugh wasn't — at least not necessarily — a vote for or against "the patriarchy." I think this kind of overstatement and hyperventilating is repellent to a lot of women and men. "Gender traitors" is very insulting and closed-minded about what different women might be thinking. Feminists should offer women freedom, not more limitation.
The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out....Less revealing than T-shirts stating political messages, or did Grenell just flip into visualizing these women policing the display of sexuality in their offspring?
These are the kind of women who think that being falsely accused of rape is almost as bad as being raped.But being falsely accused is horrible! We rarely get the choice which misfortune will befall us, but it's not right to brush aside some misfortunes because we think other misfortunes are worse. But anyway, compare the least bad rape to the worst false accusations, and you will surely see an overlap. I think there are some men — you? — who would rather be raped than to have his 2 young daughters believe, falsely, that he is a rapist. Again, life doesn't work like that. You don't get that choice. But I think just the one effect, your 2 daughters believe you are a rapist, might be as painful as an actual rape, and I'm not counting all the other potential effects that Kavanaugh was looking at: loss of the Supreme Court appointment, loss of his existing judgeship, loss of his ability to teach and to coach, loss of his wife, loss of his friends, and even loss of his liberty (as some were arguing that he should go to prison for perjury). These are not trifles! And it's counterproductive to pretend that they are for the purpose of convincing people that rape is a terrible crime.
The kind of women who agree with President Trump that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America,” which he said during a news conference on Tuesday.She's reduced herself and others to an internal organ. Uteri cry out to other uteri: Sisters! But every young man is here because a woman was a mother, and the solidarity within a family is the strongest solidarity of all. That scares you? It scares you that mothers love their sons? The love of mothers toward their sons makes us want to see them free from false accusations AND want them not to be rapists. It's not one or the other. The 2 desires are mutually reinforcing. And it really is, as you say, stupid to think otherwise.
But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.
We’re talking about white women.Because black men are not susceptible to false accusations?! That's a ludicrously convenient assertion.
The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades....The effort to inject race into the Kavanaugh problem is embarrassing. We have enough racial problems without seeing them appropriated as a makeweight in an argument about women. And it's ridiculous and contemptuous toward women to say that when we vote we're just choosing whether to vote based on race or based on sex. Stop globbing us into big groups and ordering us what to do. It's not even effective persuasion, quite apart from its being plainly factually wrong and actively destructive.
So it seems that white women are expected to support the patriarchy by marrying within their racial group, reproducing whiteness and even minimizing violence against their own bodies....I think by "minimizing violence against their own bodies" she means acting as if the violence against them isn't as bad as it really is, but the language is carelessly ambiguous in a way that doesn't serve her propagandistic agenda. The phrase could also mean doing things that lessen the extent of the violence. A woman who knows self-defense and keeps alert and aware of her surroundings is "minimizing violence." Perhaps Grenell is so focused on how women feel about what other people do to them that she didn't notice the double meaning that had to do with what women can do for themselves in this world. What's important is that the Democratic Party can endlessly offer to help women with their desperate, crying needs. And if you're a woman and you don't agree, you're a gender traitor.
During the 2016 presidential election, did white women really vote with their whiteness in mind? Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., recently measured the effect of racial identity on white women’s willingness to support Trump in 2016 and found a positive and statistically significant relationship. So white women who voted for him did so to prop up their whiteness....A statistically significant relationship doesn't tell us what was in the voters' mind! White women voted for Trump to prop up their whiteness? How do you know they didn't vote because they hate abortion or because they wanted better trade deals or they don't trust the Clintons or, hell, maybe they still held out some insane hope of making America great again?
This blood pact between white men and white women is at issue in the November midterms. President Trump knows it, and at that Tuesday news conference, he signaled to white women to hold the line: “The people that have complained to me about it the most about what’s happening are women. Women are very angry,” he said. “I have men that don’t like it, but I have women that are incensed at what’s going on.”Grenell is insulting women again. Because they're not on her political side, she disparages them as having no mind at all. Hypocritically, she's saying about them what she's accusing Trump of saying about them, that they're conned and witless. But that isn't what Trump is saying. He might be thinking it, but Grenell is saying it.
I’m sure he does “have” them; game girls will defend their privilege to the death.
But apparently that doesn’t include Ms. Murkowski anymore...Due process is nonsense.
Meanwhile, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge about due process and some other nonsense...
... due process and some other nonsense I couldn’t even hear through my rage headache....Grenell is presenting herself as a lunatic. She's doing that openly and intentionally. She's less aware, it seems, that she's also betraying the most treasured liberal values.
... as she announced on Friday she would vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh. Her mostly male colleagues applauded her.So it ends. Awful. She should fear that her histrionics and stark illiberalism will drive voters, female and male, into voting against Democrats. I don't like rivers-of-blood melodrama and race jammed in anywhere you can think of anything to say about it and contempt for the intelligence and independence of women. What an awful opinion piece! And I still don't know what "come get your people" means!
The question for white women in November is: Which one of these two women are you?
I fear we already know the answer.
Recently my friend Danielle has been tagging me in posts on Facebook about white people making unfortunate missteps, whether blatantly or accidentally, in the realm of racial reconciliation.Second, there's a tweet from Brittney Cooper (AKA ProfessorCrunk) that says:
“Abby Norman, you better come get your people.”
At first I laughed. What do you mean my people? I do not know these people. They do not speak for me. Why do you think every dumb white girl is my people, what are you trying to say?
What Danielle was trying to say was that as a white woman, with white privilege, it is my responsibility to educate other white people so everyone can live in a better world. Too often white women, and specifically I, have depended on black women to educate white communities about their lived experiences....
White Ladies, the white community is our space and our responsibility....
White feminists, when we say come get your people, we mean come get your girl, #PermitPatty, out here harassing little Black girls. This kind of thing makes me feel the opposite of non-violent.So there's this specifically racial meaning, it seems, that comes from black people who are tired of getting stuck fighting racism on their own and want white people to see it and to take the lead disciplining other white people. But Grenell isn't black, and though she tries, she's not really talking about race. She's a white woman demanding that other white women discipline white women, and not about race but about getting tripped up in the nonsense of due process rather than just automatically and uncritically believing a woman's accusations.
