On unverifiable sexual allegations about political figures

The New Neo Posted on by

It has become extremely common for people running for election (or newly-appointed to a political post) to be accused at the eleventh hour of sexual offenses. The accusation may take place at the eleventh hour, but the time of the alleged offense is almost always many years ago, and sometime many many many years ago. The accusations vary from sexual jokes in the workplace to unwanted touching, mistresses, and sexual kinkiness, all the way to more serious crimes such as assault and rape.

They are not ordinarily from completely random people; the accusers usually have had a moment when their paths either crossed with the accused (in the workplace, for example) or might have crossed (living in the same town). Sometimes the accusations were brought as part of a divorce by the person’s wife and the records are unsealed and published (this was Obama’s early m.o. against rivals).

So by now the tactic is not only not unusual; we’ve actually grown accustomed to it, as we’ve grown accustomed to the sight of attorney Gloria Allred standing next to the accuser du jour (see this and this). Just to refresh your memory, here’s an excerpt from that first link:

In a completely predictable development in the [Herman Cain accusation] case, Gloria Allred digs up another Cain accuser, Sharon Bialek, who ups the ante and accuses him of genital groping in a car in July of 1997. In another enormous surprise, the accuser failed to report the offense to the NRA or to come forward until now.

Why do I call such accusations of sexual misconduct “unverifiable”? Because ordinarily there’s no evidence whatsoever except the accuser’s words. Usually the closest we come to getting evidence is the unsealed divorce record (which usually merely contains the allegations of the accuser) or a settlement by a business (which is not an admission of guilt or even of a good case). But it’s not at all unusual to have no evidence at all, except that of proximity and opportunity (and sometimes not even that).

It’s quite different with incidents such as Trump’s “pussy” remarks, or Weiner’s penile emails, or anything with real evidence or physical evidence or documentary evidence rather than the unsubstantiated word of the accuser. In contrast, the unverifiable stories rest mostly on our evaluation of the veracity of the person making the allegations and whether their accusations are “believable” or “credible” based on what we know of the person being accused. In the case of Mitt Romney, for example, there were plenty of allegations but no sexual ones, and if there had been I doubt they would have gotten much traction (although in the current climate, they might have).

The accuser is generally someone we’ve never heard of before. How can people decide if that person can be trusted to tell the truth? Well, some listeners (way too many, actually), use the rule: “if the accused person is in my party, then the accuser is lying; if the accused person is in the opposition party, then the accuser is telling the truth.” Other observers try to look deep into the accuser’s eyes and decide if he or she (it’s ordinarily a “she” accusing a “he”) is telling the truth or is lying. In the law business, that’s called evaluating “demeanor,” and it’s always something that juries must take into account when a witness testifies.

In a trial, though, we don’t just decide these things on hunches—which is an awfully good thing, because apparently we’re not so very good at detecting who’s lying and who isn’t. In a trial, we’re supposed to decide if someone is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and there is ordinarily a great deal of additional evidence presented other than a witness’ narrative.

What’s more, in a trial we can actually see the witness (there are certain circumstances where this is not the case, but they are the exception and not the rule) and evaluate his or her demeanor for ourselves. Tone of voice, facial expression, body language—all of these can help, although we still make mistakes. In a trial the lawyers for the defense also are entitled to what’s called “discovery,” the right to receive certain kinds of evidence and information from the prosecution, as well as to receive what’s called “exculpatory evidence” (any evidence that would tend to exonerate the accused). In addition, the witness making the accusations can be cross-examined, and defense witnesses can be called. And of course, a jury’s verdict must be unanimous for conviction.

Those safeguards are meant to protect the innocent from being falsely convicted in a trial. But there’s nothing like that sort of protection for the accused in the current flurry of accusations. People are free to say what they want about a public figure because it is almost impossible for that figure to win a defamation suit. Most of the time we don’t even see the accusers, and when we do we get only their side of the story. The cross-examination process—what there is of it, because it’s not true cross-examination—is left to blogs and whatever newspaper might want to defend the person (ordinarily relatively few are in that position, if the accused is on the right).

The MSM prints the stories it wants to print—which often means accusations against Republican candidates, because those stories serve the political leanings of the MSM. The accusers say what they want to say, and although they may be subject to questioning or ridicule or scathing blog posts, they will never be subject to cross-examination because one of the hallmarks of such accusations is that charges are almost never filed against the accused, because the cases are so weak legally. Paradoxically, though, the weakness of the case—whether it be due to the mildness of the offenses (in some cases, anyway), or the lack of corroborating evidence that could hold up in court, or the antiquity of the charges—means that the left often gets more bang for its accusatory buck. That is, the repercussions for the accused can be very serious with far less proof needed, or no proof needed at all.

Right now there’s extra motivation for such accusations because it’s become au courant to make them, and that increases their general credibility. When there’s a popular hashtag “MeToo,” you know that there’s a contagion effect and we have a movement here. It becomes impossible—literally impossible—to tell who is lying and who telling the truth. That politician who was famous for saying “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy” wasn’t running for office today, when it’s unnecessary to be actually “caught” with anybody.

At least, if you’re a Republican. Bill Clinton had to be “caught” with the DNA evidence on the famous blue dress before the media was willing to concede that there had been some sexual acts between Clinton and the youngish (but not teenaged) Lewinsky. And it was up to the National Enquirer to out John Edwards for his affair; the MSM wouldn’t touch the story.

Not only is the MSM far more eager to spread the word about supposedly erring Republicans, but it is aided in this endeavor by the fact that the public judges Republicans more harshly in the sexual sphere. “They’re hypocrites!” is the refrain, if suspect behavior is alleged. Unlike Democrats, Republicans often profess to care a great deal about things such as fidelity.

Actually, the MSM and the Democrats are in an excellent position when Republicans are accused:

(1) Because of the moral principles (or moral posturing, if you will) of Republicans, GOP members have a greater tendency to abandon their fellow Republicans candidates at the merest hint of scandal. That’s quite different from Democrats, who tend to circle the wagons.
(2) The accused person, nearly abandoned, sometimes drops out. That can easily pave the way for a Democratic win no matter who replaces the candidate for the GOP, in part because many voters on the right will blame the Republican establishment for their rejection of the candidate, and decide to punish them at the polls.
(3) If the accused decides to hang tough and not drop out, a Democrat might win because voters on the right are torn and divided, unsure whether the charges are true.
(4) If the accused stays in the race and somehow manages to win against all odds, the opposition can say that Republican voters are scum who don’t care about morals and don’t care about women.

So there is a great deal of reward for making these accusations. If they are true (and some of them probably are), all the better. But if they are false, it’s highly unlikely that fact will ever be uncovered, and they will have done their job.

[NOTE I: By the way, “unverifiable” doesn’t mean “untrue,” although sometimes these accusations are untrue. It means “impossible to tell.” And defending a person’s right to not be judged on the basis of unverifiable allegations does not mean defense of the behavior alleged, although the accusers would have you think so.]

[NOTE II: Remember the classic story (perhaps apocryphal) about LBJ:

[This is] a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas. The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.

“Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.

“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”]

The Republican civil war: have you noticed…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the proliferation of comments all around the right side of the blogosphere that blame the GOPe for the accusations against Roy Moore?

This is in the vein of the sort of thing I’ve written about for years: the Republican civil war.

For example:

If these groups [on the right] persist in tearing each other apart, they will splinter into two parties””and, as I’ve written before, help assure a lengthy hegemony for the liberal/left.

I wrote that in early 2013, and I’ve written similar things before and after. It’s only gotten worse over time, and the only group that I see reaping the benefits is the left.

Nobel Peace Prize for the nuclear disarmament group ICAN

The New Neo Posted on by

I missed this news when it happened, about a month ago:

A nuclear disarmament group has won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its decade-long campaign to rid the world of the atomic bomb.

As nuclear-fuelled crises swirl over North Korea and Iran, the International Campaign To Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the honour on Friday.

“The organisation is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons,” said Norway’s Nobel committee president Berit Reiss-Andersen.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to a great many recipients who are all hat, no cattle, as they say in Texas. This one seems to be in that mold.

But I want to give them a fair shake. After all, who on earth would disagree with the idea that nuclear weapons, if used on humans, have “catastropic humanitarian consequences”? They had such consequences from the very start, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (although those bombings may have prevented even greater humanitarian catastrophes, something often denied or ignored by the pro-disarmament forces). And the use of nuclear weapons could have even greater negative consequences in terms of carnage because if they were to be used now they might be used in greater numbers and spark more retaliation.

So, trying to keep an open mind, I attempted to understand what Nobel-winner ICAN (interesting acronym) and its director were actually proposing for enforcement of any such “treaty-based prohibition.” So far I haven’t found the answer, but I found this:

Beatrice Fihn, the leader of the grassroots ICAN organisation, was “delighted” with the prize, adding that US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un should “know that nuclear weapons are illegal”.

I’m sure that will deter them from having them or using them, particularly Kim Jong-un.

Later in the article Fihn is quoted as giving this even more detailed message to Trump and Jong-un:

Asked for her message to Trump and Jong-un, ICAN’s Executive Director Beatrice Fihn said: “Nuclear weapons are illegal. Threatening to use nuclear weapons is illegal. Having nuclear weapons, possessing nuclear weapons, developing nuclear weapons, is illegal, and they need to stop.”

Fihn makes Don Quixote look like a hard-nosed realist; I begin to wonder whether she’s actually a lunatic. But instead, it occurs to me that this is probably one of those post-modern “words are everything and if you can change the word you can change the world” campaigns so popular on the left, and that the Nobel Prize committee (as it did with Barack Obama’s prize) is now committed to awarding the honor to wordsmiths who utter words that make them feel good.

But I kept trying to determine whether there was more to Fihn and ICAN than met my eye at first. That’s when I came across this Atlantic article that discusses Fihn’s viewpoint in greater depth [emphasis mine]:

Fihn leads the Geneva-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which just won the Nobel Peace Prize for mobilizing more than 120 countries to approve a United Nations treaty banning signatories from using, developing, or supporting activities related to nuclear weapons. (The treaty is now open for signatures and will become international law if at least 50 countries ratify it.) Fihn figures that if humans created nuclear weapons and attached significance to them, they are just as capable of destroying these weapons by assigning them a different meaning.

So there it is again.

Actually, I’m very familiar with this technique because it’s used a great deal in family therapy, and can be quite effective there. But in the therapy field it’s called “reframing”: re-labeling the behavior of some spouse or relative or friend and giving it a less pernicious interpretation, which can soften the anger or modify the hopelessness that is leading to a stalemate.

Sure enough, I even encountered that word itself later in the article [emphasis mine]:

The big idea behind her campaign is simple: to relentlessly treat nuclear weapons as weapons, not as some “strategic-stability-magic power tool that relates to world peace,” she said. And not just any kind of weapon, but one that belongs in a class that, by indiscriminately targeting civilians, violates international law and has repeatedly been shunned in international treaties prohibiting biological weapons, chemical weapons, cluster munitions, and landmines.

Nuclear weapons are often described with language that obscures the ugly reality of what is under discussion…

While emerging powers such as Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa have signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, Fihn has yet to persuade any nuclear-weapons states or their treaty allies””including NATO members, Japan, and South Korea, which count on protection from their nuclear-armed partners””to support the initiative. She’s even struggling to secure the backing of countries that are more loosely allied with nuclear-weapons states but still hesitant to break with them, like her native Sweden. (“New opinion poll: 9/10 Swedes want Sweden to sign the #NuclearBan,” Fihn recently tweeted. “Who gets to decide over Swedish policy? Its people or the United States?”)

But Fihn claims she doesn’t need these holdouts, at least not right away. Her goal is to “reframe the debate” and “set a clear norm that [nuclear weapons are] unacceptable,” and then use the law to effect change.

So there you have it.

Of course, it’s possible—with the current decline of logical thinking as well as the proliferation of idealistic wishful thinking in the Western world—that a lot of people will actually consider that reframe to be the sort of thing that will matter in reality. But the family of nations isn’t anything like a real family—not that the technique of the reframe even works all that reliably with the latter, but it certainly has no chance of working (IMHO) with the former, unless the entire world magically adopts it simultaneously.

Fihn is Swedish, and has a Master’s degree in International Law. She’s also 34 or 35 years old, awfully young. When I first read of her prize and her work, I immediately thought of the authors of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, one of whom received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929 for work on that agreement to ban war. I wrote about the Kellogg-Briand Pact here, and if you want to see what happened with that Pact (besides World War II, of course) have a read. But Kellogg and Briand were far more realistic about what they were doing and its chances of success than Fihn is, and far older as well as more experienced in the ways of the world, when they engineered their own unenforceable agreement to end war.

Will Moore sue?

The New Neo Posted on by

Reports are that’s he’s threatening just that:

According to AP, Moore told his supporters in Huntsville, Alabama on Sunday that the WaPo story was “fake news” and “a desperate attempt to stop my political campaign.”

Moore added that the newspaper “will be sued,” a declaration that received applause from the crowd.

I don’t see how such a lawsuit could possibly succeed, given Sullivan:

The actual malice standard requires that the plaintiff in a defamation or libel case, if he or she is a public figure, prove that the publisher of the statement in question knew that the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. Because of the extremely high burden of proof on the plaintiff, and the difficulty of proving the defendant’s knowledge and intentions, such claims by public figures rarely prevail.

“Extremely high” isn’t a strong enough phrase to describe the necessary burden of proof. One could easily substitute “nearly impossible.” As long as the accuser or accusers told a reporter that Moore grouped or abused them or kissed them nearly 40 years ago—or whatever the allegations about a public figure might be—and as long as the WaPo showed the minimal amount of due diligence (in this case, for example, ascertaining that the accuser’s mother did have a court hearing around that time and that Moore had an ofice in the courthouse at that time), the paper is judgment-proof, IMHO.

The only thing that could cause Moore to win a lawsuit like that is if there is a recording or other record of the accuser telling the WaPo reporter that she’s lying. Of course, nothing like that is at all likely to exist.

This isn’t just about Moore. It isn’t about whether the allegations are true or not (I do not know, nor do you). It’s far more general. The decision in Sullivan, coupled with the increasingly open and nakedly partisan political agenda of the MSM—there’s hardly even a pretense of objectivity any more—results in the MSM’s willingness to print any rumor about any figure it wants to destroy. And it can do so with impunity.

[ADDENDUM: And right on cue, there’s a report that Gloria Allred has found a new accuser and will be making a statement soon. Fancy that.]

On Churchill’s becoming Prime Minister

The New Neo Posted on by

Churchill became Prime Minister during an extraordinarily difficult crisis early in World War II. This was his mindset:

I was conscious of a profound sense of relief.

Relief? Most people would be terrified and/or despairing. Hitler was engaged in swiftly taking over most of Europe. The British forces were cornered at Dunkirk.

But Churchill was not most people:

At last I had authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.

He welcomed being in control, because he trusted himself. But that trust wasn’t just narcissism; he had reason to trust himself, and he thought the British people had reason to trust him, too:

Ten years in the political wilderness had freed me from ordinary party antagonisms. My warnings over the last six years had been so numerous, so detailed, and were now so terribly vindicated, that no one could gainsay me. I could not be reproached either for making the war or with want of preparation for it. I thought I knew a good deal about it all, and I was sure I should not fail.

He had been ostracized and ridiculed for his dire prognosications and warnings, and had stood virtually alone. And then it turned out he’d been correct all along. This, added to Churchill’s natural confidence, must have increased that confidence immeasurably:

Therefore, although impatient for the morning, I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.

[NOTE: You can find the quote here, but it’s also in innumerable biographies of Churchill.]

Let me tell you a story about corroborating witnesses

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Boy, I seem to be in a legal mood today. See previous post.]

I hear a lot of people saying that the 14-year-old accuser of Roy Moore must be telling the truth because her mother backs up her story, or because there are other people to back up her story or at least some small part of it. In other words, what’s known as “corroborating witnesses.”

“Witnesses” doesn’t mean “people who saw the act itself.” It can mean—and in this case does mean—-“people who were told the story (or some elements of the story) by the accuser then or later.” Usually it also means “and are willing to testify about it in court,” not just to tell it to a newspaper reporter (and sometimes remain nameless).

Well, let me tell you a little story. Many many moons ago, the divorce law in Massachusetts was pretty strict. No-fault divorce hadn’t yet come to the state. I’ve written about the situation before:

In fault divorces one person was the plaintiff and sued the other, alleging a marital offense; the other often countersued and alleged a different offense on the part of the original plaintiff. .

One of the marital offenses which constituted grounds for divorce in Massachusetts was called cruel and abusive treatment. Ordinarily that meant some sort of physical abuse—in other words, hitting or even pushing. In practice, the way it went was this: the lawyer would ask the client (typically a woman) if her husband had ever hit her. If she answered “yes,” then the lawyer would ordinarily ask whether she had told this to anyone right afterward or had shown anyone the bruises. If the answer was in the affirmative than the lawyer would ask if that person would be willing to swear to this in court.

That was because a corroborating witness was required in order to receive a divorce on those grounds. The woman’s word wasn’t enough.

This potentially made it very difficult to get a divorce, even if it was true that a woman had been physically abused by her husband. How many people immediately race off to show someone bruises, or to tell someone the tale? Many did, but many didn’t, particularly back then.

So women lied. And their friends and relatives lied. Often; very very often. And lawyers indirectly encouraged them to lie by letting them know what was needed.

If the woman initially had said, “No, my husband may have been a rotten bastard, but at least he never hit me,” then the lawyer would tell her that was actually a pity, because if he had—or if he had even so much as pushed or shoved her forcibly—it would constitute grounds for divorce if she had a corroborating witness.

The lawyer hadn’t told her to lie; that would be unethical. But funny how many women suddenly “remembered” a big big shove. And funny how many came up with a mother or sister or aunt or cousin or friend who had witnessed it or seen the bruise or heard the story right after the event.

Funny, but understandable. The motive was to get a divorce.

And there are motives to make a false accusations against public figures and to get a bunch of corroborating witnesses, too. That certainly doesn’t mean the present accusations are false; they may indeed be true, as I’ve said many times. But corroborating witnesses fail to move my truth-meter all that much.

Attempt to clear up some of the legal details connected with the Moore accusations

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Gospace” writes:

[Moore] took ”No” for an answer. That’s the takeaway. No rape, no assault, he understands the meaning of ”No”.

But that’s irrelevant where an underage person is concerned. That’s what the word “consent” in the phrase “age of consent” is all about. As I wrote a while back:

The child cannot consent to that which fails to protect that child; the child’s judgement is colored both by the greater influence of the powerful one [the adult] as well as the fact of the child’s age detracting from a child’s ability to make informed decisions in general.

In the case of the allegations against Moore (ignoring for the moment whether he’s guilty or innocent, and just taking the situation as reported), the 14-year-old girl was under the age of consent in Alabama. Legally, she could neither consent nor refuse; her wishes are irrelevant because propositioning such a person or engaging in any sexual acts with her is an offense. According to her description as reported in the WaPo, here’s what happened:

Moore chatted with [the 14-year-old after meeting her] and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

“I wanted it over with ”” I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.” Corfman says she asked Moore to take her home, and he did.

So had she been 16 and we could speak meaningfully of whether she “consented” or not, she consented to give her phone number, consented to date him, consented to go to his home, consented to kiss him, and then consented to have another date. On that second date, it is unclear whether the disrobing was consensual, but it’s quite clear that at some point during the touchings, it became nonconsensual and she conveyed that to him and he complied with her wishes.

But as I said, with a fourteen-year-old consent cannot be given or withheld. The very acts themselves are an offense because the older person has a responsibility to not engage in sexual acts with a person of that age whether they are consensual or not.

It seems that what Moore is alleged to have done would have been actionable both civilly and criminally, had it been reported at the time or in a timely fashion, but it was not. You can find a definition of the crime involved here (although I have no idea whether this was a crime in 1979, when it is alleged to have occurred, and I have no idea whether if it were to be tried today the 1979 laws or today’s laws would be operative, although my guess is that it would be 1979’s):

Section 13A-6-69 (Enticing child to enter vehicle, house, etc., for immoral purposes) It shall be unlawful for any person with lascivious intent to entice, allure, persuade or invite, or attempt to entice, allure, persuade or invite, any child under 16 years of age to enter any vehicle, room, house, office or other place for the purpose of proposing to such child the performance of an act of sexual intercourse or an act which constitutes the offense of sodomy or for the purpose of proposing the fondling or feeling of the sexual or genital parts of such child or the breast of such child, or for the purpose of committing an aggravated assault on such child, or for the purpose of proposing that such child fondle or feel the sexual or genital parts of such person.

In addition, based on these allegations it is possible that he could have been charged with sexual abuse in the second degree:

Section 13A-6-67 (Sexual abuse in the second degree)…being 19 years old or older, subjects another person to sexual contact who is less than 16 years old, but more than 12 years old…

(Again, it’s not clear whether this was actionable in 1979, but my guess is that it was).

Note, however, that I wrote it’s possible that “sexual abuse in the second degree” might apply. Why might it not apply? Because I can’t find an Alabama definition of “sexual contact,” so I’m not certain whether clothed fondling (that is what was alleged) would apply, or even it has to be something more extreme.

There’s also a potential problem with the charge of “Enticing child to enter vehicle, house, etc., for immoral purposes.” Does that statute apply to only naked touching of genitals, or does it include clothed touching?

Let’s say, though, for the sake of discussion, that the alleged acts were indeed actionable then. But would they be actionable now, after all these years? In other words, has the statute of limitations run out? I believe that, based on this, someone who had committed the alleged acts in 1979 could be charged even today [emphasis mine]:

Although the civil SOL [statute of limitations] is very short, Alabama gives prosecutors a lot of time to file violent or childhood sexual abuse [criminal] charges. The criminal statutes of limitations vary depending on the severity of the offense. The criminal statutes of limitations include (although again, it depends on the finer points of the definitions of things such as “sexual abuse”):

No statute of limitations: rape, violent sexual abuse, sexual abuse with the threat of violence, and any sexual abuse of a victim under the age of 16,
Other felony sexual abuse: three years, and
Misdemeanor abuse: one year.

So there you have it.

This, of course, only has to do with the courts—the actual courts, not the court of public opinion, which seems to have quite different standards.

On the Koreas and China

The New Neo Posted on by

Is this meaningful, or just more blah-blah-blah?

But it sounds encouraging, anyway:

The leaders of South Korea and China on Saturday agreed on the need to manage the security situation on the Korean peninsula in a stable way and to resolve North Korea-related tensions peacefully after a summit meeting, the South’s presidential office said.

Xi told Moon that he encouraged South Korea to resume dialogue with North Korea and re-engage with them for reconciliation and de-nuclearisation, state news agency Xinhua reported…

Beijing has said it is complying with United Nations Security Council sanctions and doing all it can to curb the isolated state’s provocative actions.

During Saturday’s summit, Moon and Xi also agreed to quickly normalize bilateral exchanges in all sectors, Yoon added, repeating what was said in the agreement announced last month when the two countries agreed to end a year-long standoff over the deployment of a U.S. anti-missile system.

Mere verbiage? Or signs of more pressure to come on North Korea?

The Roy Moore sex allegations

The New Neo Posted on by

The accusations against Alabama’s Republican candidate Roy Moore are the talk of the day.

First let me get this out of the way: I’m not a Roy Moore fan and never have been. But this story is particularly disturbing to me, and for the same reason I’m often disturbed by sexual allegations against candidates of all stripes and persuasions. It’s especially true of sexual allegations that are raised long after the fact—in the Moore case long long after the fact—and that are raised in the heat of a political race or political appointment.

That doesn’t mean such allegations are false. But it certainly doesn’t mean they’re true, either. I’ve never been one to subscribe to the belief that there are no false accusations. Unfortunately, there are plenty of them, although I tend to think that the majority of allegations are true. Problem is that in the absence of evidence, we are left with he-said/she-said situations (or sometimes same-sex allegations, but you get the idea). And there is ordinarily very weak or no evidence in these cases.

The closer in time the offense occurred to when it was reported to authorities and/or made public, the more likely it is to be true (and the likelier that the recollections of the parties are not tainted by the passage of time). But timing is hardly definitive, either. The farther away from an election or appointment an accusation is made the more likely it is to be true, also. In the case of Moore, the accusations fall flat on both those points. Which doesn’t mean they’re false. But it certainly doesn’t mean they’re true.

Politics is a dirty dirty business. People lie—and not just in politics, but the stakes are particularly high in politics. In the current climate, sexual allegations of any sort (the ones against Moore involve things like kissing, but they also involve one underage child of 14) are exceptionally volatile and potentially powerful.

At this point, just about any woman who’s ever had contact with a politician has the power to destroy him (I use “woman” and “him” because that’s the usual case, but it’s hardly limited to that combination of sexes, nor is it limited to politicians although they’re an especially visible example).

I detest this situation, and I’ve detested it for years. During the Anita Hill hearings, I was a Democrat. I didn’t want more SCOTUS justices who were conservative, but I was nevertheless uneasy about the hearings. I didn’t buy that Hill was lying, but I realized that the potential was there and there was no evidence she was telling the truth, either.

Legal proceedings guard against these sorts of excesses because the rules of evidence require that accusations be backed up. There’s a reason for that—our legal system prefers that a guilty person go free rather than that an innocent person be imprisoned, although it also is constructed with the belief that the system is the one most likely to arrive at the truth of the matter and the goal of only imprisoning those who should be imprisoned. Trial by rumor or newspaper (or even by extra-judicial hearing, as with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas) doesn’t cut it.

It’s bad to let perpetrators go free because people are afraid to speak up. But it’s bad to give all accusers this kind of power to destroy someone outside of a court of law. And it’s bad for people to withdraw from a race even if innocent.

In this, I believe that Donald Trump has gotten it correct:

Like most Americans, the President believes we cannot allow a mere allegation, in this case one from many years ago, to destroy a person’s life.”

“The President also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside,” she said.

I have one disagreement with that statement, however—I would replace the word “will” with the word “should.”

[NOTE: By the way, the fact that some accusers get other people to say that the accuser had told them about the abuse long ago isn’t definitive, either, although it helps to indicate that the accusations are more likely to be true. But I have seen how often people can get friends and family to corroborate lies, if all are motivated towards a certain desired end.]

[NOTE II: In the case of Roy Moore, the allegation that seems to matter most is the one about the 14-year-old. The age of consent in Alabama is 16, and the other accusers say that Moore tried to date them or kiss them at ages that varied from 16 to 18. The allegations from the then-14-year-old (Moore was 32 at the time) are more significant in terms of what is alleged to have happened, but also of course because of her age.

I’ll add that in Moore’s case it’s very curious that the accusations didn’t come out earlier during Moore’s long and controversial public career, or even earlier during this particular 2017 campaign. The timing is such that he cannot now be forcibly removed from the ballot because the September 27th deadline has passed. The only remedy would be a write-in campaign, but that runs the risk of splitting the GOP vote in Alabama.]

Heart of darkness: the baby killers

The New Neo Posted on by

What state of mind allows a person to purposely target babies for killing, up close and personal?

I ask the question because of reports that the Texas church attacker did exactly that:

The gunman who killed 26 people at a small-town Texas church went aisle to aisle looking for victims and shot crying babies at point-blank range, a couple who survived the attack said…

…he entered the church yelling “Everybody die!” and resumed “shooting hard” at helpless families, Solis said.

The gunman checked each aisle for more victims, including babies who cried out amid the noise and smoke, Ramirez said.

There is really no “why” here, nothing rational except a psychopath who wants to do evil and to be known for performing actions he considers most repellent to ordinary sensibilities.

There were two especially dangerous signs that indicated this gunman was fully capable of such actions, although he’d never killed anyone before. One was the fact that while in the Air Force he had assaulted not only his then-wife, but her son, the latter badly enough to fracture his skull. And yet he only received a penalty of one year (the lightness of that sentence puzzles me, but I’ve not seen any explanation).

The other extreme danger sign for this man was the fact that he had apparently been cruel to an animal:

Kelley was cited for animal cruelty in El Paso County on August 1, 2014, according to The Denver Post. Numerous witnesses saw him in a yard, jumping on top of a husky and beating it in the head and neck.

According to the report, Kelley called for the brown and white dog to come. When it didn’t, he ran over to it, tackled it, held it down with his knees, and punched it four to five times. The dog got up to run away, and when Kelley caught up with it, he picked it up, threw it to the ground and dragged it by its neck.

Authorities came and found the dog undernourished and took it to a vet. Kelley claimed that he was trying to restrain the dog from acting aggressively. Kelley received a deferred probationary sentence, paid fines totaling $448.50, and the charges were dismissed.

Abusing animals is often like a gateway drug for violent criminals. Of course, not all animal abusers go on to be violent to humans, and not all people violent to humans precede it with animal abuse, but the connection is very strong nonetheless and psychopaths in particular are very partial to abusing helpless creatures.

Babies are especially helpless creatures, as well.

What to do with a person like the Texas shooter before he goes on his rampage? There are two problems, of course. The first is that we cannot predict who will do this; we can only say who is more likely than others to do it. And the second is that until someone actually acts, we cannot detain that person preventively because that would be depriving them of liberty without cause.

My only suggestion would be that, after a crime (even a relatively minor one), it is necessary to look at the entire history of the perpetrator, and that a history of things such as violence against children and/or animals should weigh very heavily during the sentencing portion of the legal proceedings. But even then there’s a limit to how long such a person can be held, and that limit would be the maximum possible penalty for the offense.

When that person gets out of prison, watch out.

And if you know someone who has been violent towards animals or children, run the other way. Do not get into a relationship with this person, and advise your loved ones to do the same.

I have a philosophical and religious question about the nature of evil. I believe that we have free will, but I also believe that psychopaths are at least partly born and partly made. I am fairly sure (and have done a bit of research on this, but found nothing definitive enough to link) that most Western religions would say that despite the fact that psychopaths may have some inborn tendencies in that direction and that they may have suffered abuse in childhood that exacerbated those tendencies, they are nevertheless responsible for their actions. I tend to agree with this. But there is something so “other” about psychopaths’ makeup, so Bad-Seedish, that it remains hard to see them as people like other people with the same choices as other people.

I suppose that’s the nature of evil.

The Texas church shooter seems to be pure evil when we look at his actions during the attack (and at many times earlier in his life), but obviously some people loved him: his wives (at least initially), and perhaps the father he called in his last moments to say goodbye:

Based on evidence at the scene, investigators believe Kelley died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after he was chased by Willeford and another man and crashed his car.

The 26-year-old shooter also used his cellphone to tell his father he had been shot and did not think he would survive, authorities said.

I wonder if we’ll ever hear much about the contents of that call, or the characteristics of their relationship. Was it a bad relationship? What was the emotional tone of the call? Was the shooter capable of some sort of love? And does any of that matter in deciding whether that means he freely and voluntarily chose to do evil?

Philosophers and ethicists have been debating those issues (all you have to do is Google something like “are psychopaths responsible for their crimes?” and up will pop a host of viewpoints). See this, for example.

My own opinion (which happens to coincide with the legal point of view) is that psychopaths are morally responsible despite whatever deficits they’re born with, and we must treat them as such. Law only exempts people with certain very discrete and extremely serious mental illnesses from criminal responsibility, and these are illnesses that make it impossible for the person to tell right from wrong and/or to distinguish reality from fantasy. Psychopathy is not a mental illness, and psychopaths are well aware of what is right and what is wrong; they just think that the rules don’t apply to them.

[NOTE: I am leaving out of this discussion the killing of babies and children for political reasons, or in war as collateral damage (the latter of which is not the deliberate targeting of babies). These people are—or at least can be—somewhat different from the type of baby killers I’ve been discussing in this post. It’s a very big and complex topic—for example, among the Nazis you had quite a few sadistic psychopaths who enjoyed their work, but that was not everyone even among Nazis.]

Effects of the military draft

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Ymarsakar” writes:

The draft is a [Democrat] strategy. They kept trying to reinstate it after Nixon, because without it they cannot use fear to create anti war protests on demand.

I would say “yes, but only in recent years; the draft had a very different purpose prior to Vietnam.”

I wrote about a typical event during the “recent years” part of it in 2006. The proponents of a bill to reinstate the draft back then were very up-front about their purposes:

It seems to me that Representative Charles Rangel’s suggestion to reintroduce the draft should get some sort of prize for cynical ploys in Congress. Granted, he’s got a lot of competition, but this one is designed to offend almost everyone, including the vast majority of his fellow Democrats, and even Rangel doesn’t think for a moment that his proposal has a chance of passing…

What’s motivating Rangel, besides the desire for publicity? He says he thinks a draft would make future administrations more wary of going to war in the first place; no doubt he’s studied the Vietnam years and knows that the war protests were at least partly fueled by the understandable self-interest of the youth of America, who were reluctant to be drafted into a far-off war that seemed both unwinnable and strategically unnecessary. But Rangel also says he wants the army to be more socioeconomically even-handed; he believes it’s the poor who are exploited by the present system.

Of course, Rangel is ignoring the evidence that indicates the composition of today’s armed forces do not at all correspond to his vision [the original article had a link to an American Heritage post that is no longer at the URL]. Perception is all, after all. Not to mention the fact that the highly specialized nature of today’s military does not lend itself to a draft.

However, in the United States prior to the post-Vietnam era, the draft was most definitely not prompted by Democratic desire to ramp up antiwar protests. In fact, the drafts prior to 1940 were all wartime drafts, and their purpose was to man the military to fight those wars. The 1940 peacetime draft was the first peacetime conscription, and it was instituted with the knowledge that war was abroad and that we would probably have to fight in the not-too-distant future, and the majority of people seemed in favor of the draft:

By the summer of 1940, as Germany conquered France, Americans supported the return of conscription. One national survey found that 67% of respondents believed that a German-Italian victory would endanger the United States, and that 71% supported “the immediate adoption of compulsory military training for all young men”. Similarly, a November 1942 survey of American high-school students found that 69% favored compulsory postwar military training.

There was some opposition, but it didn’t amount to all that much.

Vietnam was very a different situation. The massive antiwar protests against that particular war ended with the end of the draft (1973) (and the end of our direct involvement), not the end of the war itself, and therefore the draft was often seen as instrumental in having fueled those protests; it had made the far-off war a very personally threatening thing. Nixon was aware of this:

Nixon also saw ending the draft as an effective way to undermine the anti-Vietnam war movement, since he believed affluent youths would stop protesting the war once their own probability of having to fight in it was gone. There was opposition to the all-volunteer notion from both the Department of Defense and Congress, so Nixon took no immediate action…

Instead, the Gates Commission was formed, headed by Thomas S. Gates, Jr., a former Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower administration. Gates initially opposed the all-volunteer army idea, but changed his mind during the course of the 15-member commission’s work. The Gates Commission issued its report in February 1970, describing how adequate military strength could be maintained without having conscription. The existing draft law was expiring at the end of June 1971, but the Department of Defense and Nixon administration decided the draft needed to continue for at least some time…

…Meanwhile, military pay was increased as an incentive to attract volunteers, and television advertising for the U.S. Army began. With the end of active U.S. ground participation in Vietnam, December 1972 saw the last men conscripted, who were born in 1952[66] and who reported for duty in June 1973…

Since then, although the Selective Service mechanism has remained largely in place in case a draft is needed once again, we’ve had no draft. For the most part, we’ve just had showboaters such as Rangel talking about reviving it as a scare tactic.

If a draft were to be reinstated, it would almost certainly meet with a very different attitude on the part of the population than during WWII. It would of course also depend on the nature of the conflict, but unless this country were to be directly and seriously threatened I think a draft would indeed meet with fervent opposition that would make the Vietnam era protests seem minor. The idea of risking one’s life for one’s country—or its allies—is now confined to a smaller segment of society.

However, the peacetime draft had some interesting side effects. One was that it forced people who lived in homogeneous enclaves (for example, urban vs. rural, Northern vs. Southern, Democrat vs. Republican) into close contact with each other and therefore forced them to learn about each other (and sometimes to stop demonizing each other, if that had been their previous tendency). Another effect was that people from all walks of life were forced to learn something factual about weapons and the waging of war, so that they were less likely to operate in a mental vacuum about those topics and less likely to fill in that vacuum with fantasy.