CNN’s all-female focus group doesn’t go quite as planned
[Hat tip: Oregon Muse at Ace’s.]
Oopsies.
CNN asked women if they believe Judge Kavanaugh.
This was not the response they were expecting.
Wow. pic.twitter.com/RCgZBBzpDF
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) September 21, 2018
Wow. Common sense.
HAHAHAHA that is priceless! I’m surprised CNN even aired that. Amazed, actually.
My schadenfreud runneth over. What did the info bimbo from CNN expect? Two hundred women wrote in support of Kavenaugh after this latest accusation came out. One woman wrote a bit on Twitter in support of Ford and then retracted it. Plus these are Republican woman! Maybe they think innocent until proven guilty, unlike Democrats these days.
The bimbo undoubtably lives in such a hermetic bubble that it didn’t occur to her that anyone anywhere could possibly disbelieve Ford. You almost see the cognitive disonance on her face at the end of the clip
Interesting. I have argued on rules of evidence. The women argue on maturity and proportionality. #HateLovesAbortion
My guess was that this was actually a focus group of Republican women.
My guess was correct.
It’s still possible that liberal-bias at CNN means they are surprised. It’s also possible that liberal-bias at CNN means they are not. I haven’t the slightest.
But either way, they let the segment run unmolested. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about CNN’s critics, whose decision to clip “Republican” from the focus group constitutes leaving out a material fact.
Manju:
You continue on your silly and ultimately tiresome way.
No one here clipped “Republican” from anything. I saw the video on a blog that embedded a twitter feed that included the clip, and I thought it was interesting so I included it here. I also imagined this was probably not a random group of women and I didn’t say it was. But I had no idea what the group consisted of (other than women, which is obvious on looking at it) nor how it was chosen.
“It didn’t quite go as planned” doesn’t just mean, by the way, that none of the women were sympathetic to Ford. Perhaps CNN expected that, or perhaps not. Perhaps CNN even wanted to show that aspect of things because maybe they were trying to indicate something like “Republican women are so hardass and mean that they don’t even support the wonderful, vulnerable, Christine Blasey Ford.” For all I know, that was CNN’s intent.
The surprise to CNN—IMHO—was how articulate the women were in stating their case and how unable the reporter was to make a dent in what they were saying. They sounded so much more coherent than she.
n.n, “the women” are smarter than you think. When I was in junior college back in the early 80s, when Brett Kavanaugh was supposedly raping his fellow high school students, I was writing for a college newspaper. And back then the “rape culture” narrative was being shaped by the women’s grievance narrative department. So we looked into it.
Serendipitously at the time I received a survey from the Wymyn’s center actually assuming that I had raped women. Because all men are rapists. They wanted to know how many women I had raped, under what circumstances, had I drugged them, etc. I threw it in the trash. According to the mailing it was anonymous. A month or so later I received a follow up letter from the Wymyn’s center addressed to me personally asking why I hadn’t returned my anonymous survey.
None too clever, are they, then or now.
But one thing I learned during the course of my reportage is that if you ever are accused of rape you would rather have a jury of women than men. A jury of men are going to be glaring at you thinking, “If you did this to my daughter I would (fill in the blank).”
Women will know not to automatically believe other women because they are in fact women.
This is what cost Hillary her last election in at least my neck of the woods in North Texas. She was demanding loyalty base on shared lady parts. Vote for Hillary because, ovaries. Vote for Hillary because, pussy hats. And OBTW all the men in your life are deplorable. So it dawned on the women here that Hillary was really talking about them and they gave her the finger and said I love my father and my husband and I chose to procreate with the man I love and now I love my sons and how dare you stake claim to my lady parts.
While there is some tension between men and women, at the end of the day we actually like each other. I can see why it wouldn’t dawn on Hillary because she’s a Harpy married to a sexual predator, but that’s not normal. But if the Democrats want to make it their campaign platform that women need to hate the men in their lives, I say go for it.
Beautiful! These women all think along the same lines as me. Glad it was on CNN. One segment that wasn’t fake news.
If anything happened (And there are serious doubts that it did.) it was a youthful mistake on Kavanaugh’s part and a youthful mistake on her part that she didn’t report anything at the time it happened. If something did happen, he matured and became a responsible adult. He has lived an admirable life. It is a cause for celebration. Professor Ford would try to destroy a man just because she doesn’t like his politics. No tolerance, no sense of justice, no belief in redemption, no forgiveness, no live and let live.
I believe Judge Kavanaugh when he says he doesn’t know the woman. I went to a very small high school in a very small town. Yet, I do not remember any sophomore girls and only a handful of sophomore boys from the year when I was a senior. I can look in my year book and recognize the names, but I can’t say that I knew them in more than a passing way. At that stage of life a two year difference in age is a big thing. Seniors did not date or party with sophomore girls. Seniors tended to stay socially within their age group. If four senior boys were at a party with one sophomore girl, it would be a very unusual situation. When you read the year books from Professor Ford’s private school, it seems that there was a high degree of out of control partying and sexual games going on. Maybe the year books are youthful bragging. I would hope so, but it puts a bad light on the life style these young women were pursuing.
The CNN interviewer did not pick up on just how bad the feedback was (for the Democrats’ goal of stopping Kavanaugh AND boosting their blue wave). She brought the line ‘well why not have a three day FBI investigation to get at the truth?’ but all those women were saying is that they don’t care if it’s true – true as described by Ford – they still would not want the Kavanaugh nomination to be stopped.
I get the feeling that whoever was in charge of screening these participants will be fired. You’re suppose screen women who believe Kavanaugh is a rapist and that society is patriarchal, something that needs to be destroyed.
Something I haven’t seen addressed — why must we presume that her drunken assessment of what happened had to be “attempted rape” if, indeed, there was some kind of incident? Why isn’t possible that her assessment of what happened is an serious over-reaction? Why isn’t possible that she is exaggerating? I.e. some drunken boy tried to kiss her, they fell to the floor, she walked away. Honestly, her actual description sounds like she has over-reacted.
I had a friend in HS do something somewhat similar at a party the first time he got wasted. He was drunkenly too aggressive trying to kiss a girl and ended up stumbling on top of her on the floor. It took her a little work, but she eventually extricated herself from his foolishness and laughed. He stayed spread eagled on the floor and passed out. Of course, she wasn’t drunk like Ford was. If today her memory was that he “tried to rape her”, should his life be wrecked?
I wasn’t thinking about anyone here.
Because someone left out a material fact.
I don’t think they were surprised at all.
Manju:
The video was put up as part of a brief tweet, just meant to highlight the video. The tweet was meant to be a bit humorous.
And I think they were very surprised at the high caliber of the women’s responses compared to the interviewer.
I’m with the Grandma: who gave those kids the alcohol?
I am also a mature woman and I made a lot of the same points in the comment section to Patti Davis’s recent article. I was insulted and accused of being a man who didn’t care about women. Nice to see I am not alone in my opinion.
Rosalyn C: This speaks to why the internet and blogs like Neo’s are so important.
People have to know they are not alone in their opinions.
http://archive.is/Kp3ot
This is an automated feed of the blog posts at http://fredrikdeboer.com
May 8·
of course, there’s the backchannel
“Couple years ago I got myself into one of these mini-controversies I’m always stepping in.
..[long story omitted, but it was quite interesting]..
Their commitment to looking for outsiders apparently did not compel them to look beyond their own masthead. It just didn’t make sense to me.
So I said so, on my blog and on Twitter. I said, simply, that if you were going to set up a fellowship to give money and exposure to outsider voices, they should be actual outsiders. … I thought it was a question worth raising publicly.
It did not go over well.
…
I was frustrated that people refused to see my actual point instead of getting mad about personal insults that I wasn’t actually making.
But that incident was also a high tide, for me, of the media backchannel?—?that second line of communication, the private counterpart to the public face of the internet that is social media. There’s the person you perform publicly, online, and the person you are privately. I’ve always gotten a healthy dose of that, this second face, since the very beginning, and this situation really brought people out of the woodwork. I got what you were actually arguing, they would say, and I think you’re right.
…
My position was unpopular, but I was right then, and I’m right now. The situation made no sense. And while I appreciated that people were willing to reach out privately, the failure to speak up publicly can have high stakes. Increasingly I am concerned, in various worlds, with the distance between the public and private. Increasingly I wish that people were willing to say publicly what they now reserve only for all the backchannels out there.”
RTWT
Stan Brown:
Your take sounds a lot like my own (posted in another thread):
I also wonder whether there might have been some misinterpretation of the event itself? (Presuming it happened at all, and no matter the identities of the boys.)
Presume two boys are drunk and they play a prank on another person at the party. They dash off — weavingly — to another part of the house, laughing about their prank, fleeing with exaggerated theatricality from the person they’ve played a joke on. They burst into a back bedroom, where there’s a girl already there, bowl her over, and fall on top of her. The person they’ve pranked can be overheard roaming the house, coming up the stairs behind them, shouting and looking for them. One shuts the door. They both tell one another and the girl to be quiet — “shut up!” “you shut up you’re louder than me!” “dude” (giggle) “shhh!” (girl begins to say something) “no no shut up!” (hand over mouth) “be still he’ll hear us!” “dude, you landed on top of me, get off” (squirming pile of teens; awkward hand position winds up in wrong place on girl, hastily moved) “wait shhh!” — and after a minute the aggrieved party is gone, the two boys get up and, still giggling and shoving one another, lurch their way out of the room and to another part of the house.
Meanwhile, the girl isn’t sure what to think of all of this. She was pretty intoxicated herself; some boys fell on top of her in a way that involved bodily contact with some personal regions which may or may not have been intentional; they were laughing about something she didn’t know about, each of them kept telling the other to be quiet; and then one of them put his hand on her mouth when she was about to make a noise. And then they left without explaining why. She feels a bit weird about this whole experience, on top of which she’s feeling drunk and ill.
Years later, thinking back on this during marriage therapy, she wonders whether some of her current intimacy issues might date back to that disquieting experience.
And the rest is history.
Is that plausible?
Seems that way to me, although perhaps I missed a detail that makes this explanation implausible.
Now that’s funny.