34 Comments

You're right it's totally nuts. I guess that - to be blunter than I maybe need to be - lots of media people are really dumb? Especially the kind who read the Washington Examiner?

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Rilly rilly dumb. The nuances of language, spoken or written, are completely beyond most of the wingers.

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I think they're aware of them, they just ignore them in favor of the große Lüge.

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SOP for the "Washington Examiner", the preferred shart, I mean outlet, of the Lords Proprietors and the Incels Who Want To Be Them

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For fuck’s sakes, we live in perverse times.

Carroll’s huge mistake was making a relatively subtle point when everyone knows subtlety is, like, a serious sin.

Compounding the error was Cooper’s inept response and then the media jumping on to echo the mistaken reporting.

But as I’ve been saying ad nauseum, the media see their job as reporting anything that attracts an audience, truth be damned. And here was the additional bonus of implicitly legitimizing Trump; Carroll’s story is just confirmation that he’s a serial sexual assailant and the media have already ruled that that is a nothing urgent of a story.

Jesus. Of course you’re not nuts here, Roy. You know you’re not.

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"Cooper's inept response" is right. I haven't seen the interview, but if he really did "panic" and hustle it to commercial, shame on, and fuck, him. He should have clarified this very point. "You're not saying it IS sexy, you're saying other people think it is, right?" How deft and subtle do you have to be to keep this radioactive subject under control? (And you'd think that he, as a sophisticated gay man, would be alert to this sort of thing.)

You'll note, too, that at the end of his disclaimer, Trump said his trademark, "...okay?" That's how you know he's lying. And when he *doesn't* say "okay?" that's how you know he's lying, too.

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I knew what she meant from the get-go. It reminds me of an old response from an advice columnist (I think Miss Manners, not E. Jean) who got a letter from a woman who'd been mugged and suffered significant injuries. She was recovering and getting back to work and to her regular life, but was disturbed because friends and co-workers kept pressing for more information about the attack. She wanted to know why they would do that about an upsetting experience. Miss Manners(?) responded: "They want to know if you were raped. You don't have to tell them anything." (Or possibly ",,,Don't tell them"; my memory is hazy.)

Regardless of their intentions, which may have been partly or largely sympathetic, they were giving in to a wish to know something that on some level they found titillating, and yes, that's disturbing, and yes, that's what E. Jean was getting at.

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I think the rightwing outlets’ choice to mislead people is more nefarious than stupid. They are attempting to amplify Trump’s ridiculous defense of “she’s not my type” by re-categorizing a rape as sex, and also trying to portray Carroll as some loopy old broad who thinks rape is sexy and is just mad the now-President wasn’t interested in her.

Once you remember Trump set the tone of conflating rape and sex with his “not my type” remark, you realize the wingnuts are just trying to pick up that ball and run with it.

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I’ll just add that I thought we as a society acknowledged rape wasn’t sex back in the 1970s after Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will, but since the age of Trump has us re-litigating the humanity of black and brown people and musing over whether women should get to control their own bodies, sure, why the fuck not reopen the question of whether women really enjoy being raped.

We are in Hell.

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I, too, thought we'd managed to move beyond "if it looks like it's inevitable, lie back and enjoy it." But, no. We're being ruled by troglodytes. And for the life of me I will never understand why any woman could possibly vote Republican.

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I recently read a column that addressed why some women vote Republican. Don't remember who wrote it (I'll post a link if I do), but here's the gist of the argument: Republicans will never allow women at the top of the social hierarchy, but at least they can be #2, ahead of all the other minorities. If you're a Republican or undecided woman, you're either enthusiastic about this bargain or you think it's the best you can hope for.

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A Rightwing news outlet manages to do a cut-n-paste to make someone's words take on a completely different meaning? I'm shocked. SHOCKED, I say.

When you're dealing with conservatives, it will always be a mixture of dishonesty, bad-faith argument, and outright lunacy. So dishonestly conflating Carroll's observation of American culture with her accusations against President Penis-head is par for the course.

But consider just how twisted and depraved, dishonest and committed to bad-faith argument you have to be to claim that the kids in cages down in Texas "are free to leave at any time, but they stay because they're well cared for." That's some seriously crazy shit, right there. But it's only natural when your party's leader begins his term in office by looking out over the puny assemblage of people gathered to witness his swearing in and proclaims it the largest crowd EVAR for an inauguration.

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Roy Edroso says he’s “wrong,” “nuts.”

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"Ammo for Trump"? What does that mean? What "ammo" does Trump need in this discussion? You'd probably think out of the nowhere that what Trump could use in this discussion is some evidence that his version of the story is true and he didn't do it.

What this line suggests is a point in an altogether different argument that nobody would really want to make in public: that rape is OK, in fact sexy, as all of these supposedly anti-rape people keep acknowledging, before hastily cutting to the commercial. If it's "ammo for Trump", it's ammo in defense of a Trump who did do it and is pleased with himself, and what that suggests to me is that everybody knows he did and they're all just playing rhetorical games.

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Oh, but playing rhetorical games is what they do best.

AOC is a moral monster because she called the kid-detention centers "concentration camps," which, even though the camps fit the dictionary definition of concentration camp, Righties have argued is NOT what the term means and therefore AOC deserves to be kicked out of Congress. And thus we end up discussing whether or not the fucking dictionary definition of concentration camp is correct and NOT discussing the fact that we're holding children in unspeakable conditions.

Donald Trump is a serial rapist. But we're not going to discuss that any more because one of his accusers made a casual observation that can be taken completely out of context. So now we'll discuss whether or not women REALLY do not secretly enjoy being raped.

Rhetorical games is all they have left because at this point, even their best efforts at sophistry cannot sustain the facade.

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"Oh, but playing rhetorical games is what they do best."

Yup. Concentration camps aren't concentration camps just like torture isn't torture.

(Of course the only logical response to that is, "It's *not* a concentration camp? Why don't you spend your next two-week vacation in one?")

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What a world of difference one word can make - between what Carroll actually said: "I think most people think of rape as being sexy. They think of the fantasies." and what even-the-liberal Daily Beast says she said: "I think most people think of rape as being sexy. Think of the fantasies.".

One version sounds detached from and implicitly critical of "most people". The other sounds as if she is identifying with them, and their association of rape with those "fantasies".

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That stood out to me, too. The way the Daily Beast writer had it, you'd think she was lapsing into an erotic reverie in the middle of the interview.

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Once again I'm reminded that I must never ever trust these god damn out takes. Either ignore them or read the whole thing.

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"Am I nuts or is this nuts?" Both? I never trust headlines, and in right wing noise machine outlets, the headlines are just a distilled essence of the crazy lies in the bulk of the story itself.

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You're not losing your mind. They're intentionally lying about her in order to protect the God-Emperor.

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I would call this nuts, except it's more like a plan

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It's so nuts that I want to kick someone in the nuts. Maybe the rapeyest raper. Or just the next guy I meet at the mall.

Actually it's not nuts at all. Rape culture USA has been telling themselves this for basically ever. It's why Ovid's story of Philomela and Procne is so ground-breaking and devastating. Because the rape scene is so unrelenting horrible and so obviously violent that it is impossible to make it sexy.

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I hate those "sympathetic writers" almost as much as the wingnuts.

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Oh fuck, me too.

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Cheer up,

"Eric Trump says he was spat on at Chicago’s Aviary"

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So, even The Birds hate young Trump?

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Trump's nor my type statement is an example of a person insinuating that rape that rape is sexy.

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This is same the talk-radio playground bullshit that spawned by headlines like "Obama Tells Steve Jobs 'You Didn't Build That'". It's beyond taking out of context, it's a total, lying distortion. From a scientific view, I do think it's remarkable that these folks have gotten this far without the human gene for shame. (Or empathy, or compassion, or judgement, or...)

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