Thread by @l78lancer

Please, help me out here.

There are a few relevant things right now that are not inconsistent:

1. Joe Biden is generally a good guy.
2. That notwithstanding, he mishandled the Anita Hill and a few other situations, and he has to live with that.

3. "I believe her" should mean exactly that.

So, Biden is a human and as such is fallible. No one should be trusted implicitly
without having earned - and proved - that trust. And with that in mind, I Believe Her becomes more important because, as a society,...

...we are oriented to give some people the benefit of the doubt and not others. That's particularly true for people of power or prestige.

But at the point when the information, evidence, and facts don't match up
allegations and assertions, when does I Believe Her undermine the very agency
that the phrase is intended to create for people, primarily women who have
historically been victimized and unheard,...

...by being coopted to victimize an individual with an accusation for political or other purposes, thus becoming a disservice to victims and accusers alike?

At what point does I Believe Her stop being a reasonable, rational and necessary construct for justice, closure or healing in specific cases and become
weaponized, losing its value as a vehicle for change in the bigger sense?

The question is not about equivocating on whether women should be believed, rather, it’s about when and how does the construct not become absolute to the point where it is rigid, blind, flawed, and potentially abused?

There are many, many holes, inconsistencies in the Reade story. That’s fact. The claim has moved from sexual assault to sexual harassment which Biden may not have even known about. What’s more, the stories, assertions, and details are continually fluid.

Forget about the fact that Reade herself swung from being highly supportive of Biden in recent years to totally appositional. Forget that she wrote an essay supportive of Putin just two years ago or that her current lawyer is a big Trump supporter.

A significant part of this society - conservatives - never manages to hold itself accountable for many of its biases, transgressions and violations even according to their own values. Yet they are very happy to hold others to a very different and much higher standards.

They've also been intent on trivializing I Believe Her on the one hand from the start and propagandizing or exploiting it on the other. Therefore, it's easy to get a whiff of the political projection, deflection, obfuscation, subterfuge and gamesmanship BS well over a mile away.

Whereas, as liberals, our reflex and default is to always second-guess ourselves even on clear and unquestioned matters. We seem intent on amputating entire limbs from the body rather than finding and treating the specific problem on almost any matter.

When I look at how the democrats and the liberal media are turning themselves inside out right now it's easy to understand as a party, we have a tough time distinguishing between baby and bathwater.

Why is the democratic party being schizophrenic about the issue now, and why is the media chasing down this rabbit hole?

While it is true to say that liberals perceive ourselves to be different from conservatives in numerous important ways, that we do not want to be the same, and that we hold ourselves to higher standards, that is a bit intellectually dishonest here.

This is not about liberals not wanting to be the same as conservatives as much as it is liberals eating themselves from the inside out when there’s no need. It’s self-immolation.

So what are we doing democrats, and why?

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