Sinfest

It's obvious with the booze and the signs this was meant to cash in on the debacle. As people have said before, the female characters have become more homogenized since he went radical. I think he's not subscribing to the Beauty Equals Goodness mentality.

http://www.sinfest.net/view.php?date=2018-10-10

Trump Bot strikes again!

I wonder if he'll make a Kavanaugh Bot...

And this is where it gets tricky: More than once had the discussion of the politics that are being "discussed" (for a loose definition of the term) by a given strip or the comic's modern iteration in general has necessarily drifted to discussion of the involved posters' political stances/beliefs because it became clear that we're split into two camps that have heavily incompatible views of the comic's political views, especially when it comes to Donald Trump and his presidency ^note Most of us revile both Trump and Tats' own obsession with shallowly and hypocritically hating on him, but shockingly enough a few posters only hate the fact that Tats hates on him and brag about voting for the guy just to spite Tats and people like him (and yes, that they don't regret the decision despite all that has happened over the past two years and counting). IIRC, that was the main reason why we have a taboo on discussing US politics in and of itself rather than the way the comic "discusses" it..

Edited by MarqFJA on Oct 9th 2018 at 6:21:00 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

"Believe survivors"... and every woman with a story of being raped or sexually abused is a "survivor."

Just ask Tawana Brawley, Crystal Gail Mangum, Jackie Coakley, Nikki Yovino, Mandy Stubbs, or the ''unidentified woman'' in this case (wouldn't want to traumatize her by revealing her name!).

Apparently Tats believes that women are incapable of telling lies. They have to be truthful, all the time — their primitive, childlike brains just aren't up to the complex task of being untruthful.

Hey, Tats! Here's an idea for you: Why don't you do a strip that condemns that notorious rape apologist Atticus Finch?

Edited by Hexapodia on Oct 9th 2018 at 8:56:47 AM

DAAAAAAAMN. Fuckin Savage.

Also, the salt is going to intensify dramatically in a very short period of time,it is going to be both cringey and hilarious. I am in fact looking forward to it and have been for some time now.

And I don't mean just from Tats. Although make no mistake.... I am probably looking forward to his reaction the most.

Tats is putting fire on gasoline at this point. I also think he's going to drag out this issue more than not.

Good. I find his insanity entertaining.

Plus, the Trump Drone is kinda cute.

DAAAAAAAMN. Fuckin Savage.

I have strong feelings about this sort of thing ... because it happened to a friend of mine.

Tom, one of my roommates in grad school, married a charming and beautiful young woman — runner-up for Miss California, in fact. Alas, she was also a sociopath, a druggie, and sexually promiscuous — she even banged his fifteen-year-old brother! But by the time he filed for divorce, they had a two-year-old daughter. So his soon-to-be ex-wife accused him of child molestation. His ex's "expert witness" psychologist said women don't lie about such things, and the Family Court judge believed her.

Tom lost his job, his house, and his reputation. He was forbidden to contact his daughter, and he narrowly escaped being labelled a sex offender. He tried for fifteen years to clear his name ... and then through a set of extremely unlikely circumstances he obtained a copy of a letter that his ex had written to her mother before the divorce: "The fix is in! My crooked lawyer found a crooked psychologist who will examine Tom and tell the judge that he's crazy!" His ex made a couple of stupid moves that enabled him to get the case re-opened, and she actually admitted in court that she had made up an entirely false accusation ... because she wanted to win.

So let me tell you how Tom's ex was punished for perjury, screwing Tom in the divorce, and putting him through hell for a decade and a half: <crickets>

Yup. no consequences whatsoever.

Believe survivors, because women don't lie! These delightful young ladies, for example ...

That's fucking horrible. She is straight up evil.

You know, though, it is something of a wonder: Tats manages to keep up the..... rage? Hysteria? Madness? Whatever it is he's rolling with, for a REALLY long time. I mean, you can only keep that up so long before you burn yourself out on it.

Again, I don't think he's alone in this. He needs to obey his "Muse."

And if he's married to her, he might be afraid of crossing her. There's an old joke: "Guys! Don't bother getting married! Just find a woman who hates you, and buy her a house!"

Just because you know of one false accusation doesn't mean that this one is, or that it is at all common. False accusations are a drop in the ocean compared to the staggering amount of sexual harassment going on. When you are talking about, what was it, thirty percent of all women being sexually harassed by men, you can't help but give accusers the benefit of the doubt.

Especially not when it is SO costly to do so. That woman's life is RUINED thanks to half the nation raking her over the coals, just because she told what happened to her.

Optimism is a duty.

IF that's what happened to her. If it wasn't, then should we excuse her for lying? The slogan over here is "BELIEVE ALL WOMEN!" Why? I would no more believe all women than I would believe all men.

Just because you know of one false accusation ..

One? Did you follow the links?

That woman's life is RUINED thanks to half the nation raking her over the coals ...

"That woman" is now a hero to the American Left. She's also one million dollars richer, thanks to a GoFundMe campaign. There were also plenty of holes and inconsistencies in her story (or stories, since she changed the details), but I won't go into them here because I don't want to derail the thread. My point was that women are capable of lying — sometimes for trivial reasons — in ways that ruin other people's lives.

The "thirty percent" claim (actually, it used to be twenty percent, but these stories tend to mutate) included any number of actions by other people that both sexes encounter.

Edited by Hexapodia on Oct 10th 2018 at 3:25:46 AM

She is also demonized by the right, though.

And she's being victim blamed by the fucking president. Don't tell me her life isn't in shambles right now.

Optimism is a duty.

You know, it's rather telling when people's first reaction to a sexual assault allegation isn't "we need to investigate what happened to discern the truth", but "she's definitively lying".

That's what I meant with this thread turning into Sinfest's antithesis - Tats is constantly trying to put women on a pedestal and presenting them as as these pure beings that can do no wrong, so the natural reaction seems to be to veer as much in the opposite direction as possible.

Spite is rarely a healthy motivator - not to mention the frankly distasteful helicopter ride references.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Oct 10th 2018 at 1:17:11 PM

Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.

For Tats this comic probably is meant to be some sort of horror scenario come to life, but I can't stop laughing at the hammy behaviour of the Trump drone!

Lying about rape is unfortunately more common than people would think. I remember a while ago that GHB was a popular drug with teens to use recreationally while drinking with friends.

What people didn't know is that it's hard to get the dosage right, especially when you're mixing it with alcohol and are not accustomed to using it. So those people would go "out" or became erratic suddenly and fall to the ground. An ambulance would be called. The person would come to and had to explain to paramedics, police and parents what happened. What do you think what the most common explanation was? "I tried drugs for the first time, didn't know what I was doing and used too much, sorry mom and dad!" No, of course not!

"Having my drink tampered with while I didn't know; I almost got raped" became such a common excuse to use for young girls it became memetic amongst ambulance staff and addiction specialists.

Fun fact about GHB: it tastes vile and strong. It's incredibly salty and acidic. Users mix it in with carrot juice or bitter lemon to mask the taste. Not exactly popular drinks while going out with friends. Pretty strange for a "common date rape drug", isn't it?

My point here is not that all people claiming to have been raped are liars, but it's also necessary to require proof besides what the victim claims has happened. A claim is easily made and the consequences can be devastating.

Edited by hayate666 on Oct 10th 2018 at 1:21:48 PM

My point here is not that all people claiming to have been raped are liars, but it's also necessary to require proof besides what the victim claims has happened. A claim is easily made and the consequences can be devastating.

This. A thousand times this.

Red, as was pointed out a few times now, the southern united states has a LONG list of reasons as to why the reaction to accusations like this needs to be "Okay, where's the evidence?" and not "listen and Believe". Most of those reasons usually ended with "and then after a long string of torture, a black man was hung from a tree".

Between that, and the Matress Girl saga awhile ago, I'd say my cynicism is well founded.

Of course we need evidence. But that is not the same thing as assuming she is lying almost right off the bat.

And I get the feeling that some people are only saying that because Trump is saying it. But Trump is a sexist asshole who treats ALL women with disdain, not just those who accuse him or oppose him. Just look how he treats female journalists in general.

And just to be clear, I am far from taking the opposite side of Sinfest. At its core, it is supporting women's rights, and I am all for that. The problem with Sinfest is not the opinions so much as the degree to which those are pushed. This is why "men generally don't treat women very well" becomes "ALL men are evil scumbags who need to be eradicated". It is the extremism, not feminism, that I oppose.

Optimism is a duty.

I don't think anyone here is saying "the victim is definitely lying."

If one of you is saying that, please say so now so I can acknowledge my error. Then, raise your right hand, take hold of it with your other hand, and proceed to beat yourself with it.

No, what's telling for me is that when people point out that false accusations happen, and that we shouldn't just gloss over those as "a drop in the ocean," and that even if they are, acting as though the lives that have been ruined by them don't matter is morally and ethically reprehensible, people immediately assume you're siding with rapists or accuse you of blaming the victims.

I have guy friends who are terrified of being alone in the same vicinity as a woman because if she decides their actions, however innocent, were inappropriate in some way, they're done. My speech pathologist from high-school would deliberately ask female students to leave the door open when they were in his office.

I have seen people affected by this. I'm not just going to ignore the ones impacted because someone's ideology considers their suffering trivial.

No. Any opinion that bases its estimate of a person's moral or ethical behavior on their gender is definitely a problem. And if anyone believes you can judge someone on the basis of being a particular gender or biological sex, then that person is part of the problem.

And again, can we leave Trump out of this?

Edited by Dragon573 on Oct 10th 2018 at 11:02:38 AM

It's kind of funny. Sufficiently advanced stupidity is like sufficiently advanced science; eventually, you find something you can't solve.

I don't think anyone here is saying "the victim is definitely lying." If one of you is saying that, please say so now so I can acknowledge my error.

There's at least one other possibility: Christine Blasey Ford might honestly believe that she's telling the truth ... yet she might be mistaken.

Perhaps she was assaulted at a party, but the person who attacked her wasn't who she now believes he was. Or perhaps the incident didn't happen the way she said it did because more than thirty years later her memory of it isn't trustworthy.

It may be significant that according to her own testimony, her memory of the party surfaced in 2012 as a result of psychological counseling. An incident that she hadn't discussed with anyone for three decades was "revealed" by therapy to have ruined her psychological well-being.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a moral panic in the United States over the supposed epidemic of "Satanic ritual child abuse" which "involved hundreds of accusations that devil-worshipping pedophiles were operating America's white middle-class suburban daycare centers." Outlandish claims of thousands of abductions, incidents of torture, human sacrifices, secret societies, underground tunnels ... all based on children's recovered memories revealed by psychological counseling. The most notorious case was the McMartin Preschool trial.

The experts — psychologists who specialized in recovering memories — assured the legal system that "recovered" memories were valid and trustworthy. (Similarly, astrologers assert that astrology is valid and trustworthy.) The experts assured the public that "children don't lie!" when even the most outlandish claims were challenged.

The movement pretty much fell apart when other psychologists demonstrated that it was possible and even easy to implant false memories, either by accident or by design. Yet even today there are psychologists who believe in the validity of recovered memory therapy and use it in their practice.

Was Dr. Ford's psychologist a practitioner of recovered memory therapy? We don't know! Dr. Ford refuses to release the notes of her counseling sessions to investigators.

Edited by Hexapodia on Oct 10th 2018 at 10:11:34 AM

Ishida, don't lick your wounds when you are buthurt. Your head is far enough up your own ass already.

That doesn't necessarily mean "the majority of people who claim they were raped are lying."

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

It also doesn't not necessarily mean that, but what's your point exactly?

I didn't claim that "the majority of people who claim they were raped are lying", just that it's common and easy enough that reasonable doubt must be maintained.

Dragon573 gave a good example of why that's important.

I work as a man in a social profession and avoiding potentially compromising situations is always on my mind. You'd be amazed how much the radical feminist narrative of "all men as potential rapists" has influenced the way men are looked at in my line of work. It's not pretty!

My guess is that you're not an elementary school teacher ... there are virtually no men in this profession now, due to the past thirty years of moral panics over child sexual abuse.

http://www.sinfest.net/view.php?date=2018-10-11

Hoo, boy. Looks like we're all in for a long rant about the evils of men. Oh, but look at that, a woman who is employed as a news anchor instead of a working girl! But surely this cannot be, for in the Patriarchy, women can't be anything but sex workers!