Weinsteins step down as Miramax CEOs

tbf lots of modern day philosophers are also sex criminals

Comedians are good at observations but not necessarily advice

UBC did handle their inquiry poorly, but Atwood's article is misrepresenting the open letter she signed, which had zero sympathy for victims.

The following statement is from Signatory Margaret Atwood and was drafted with input and guidance from UBC Student Elaine Corden.
We’re sorry we hurt any survivor people out there by seeming lacking in empathy for your experiences. Our letter was not intended to wound you, but it seems to have done, and for that we apologize. We do not intend to discourage anyone from speaking up in future, and hope the University will put in place a workable support system. To survivors of abuse, we were, are, and will be your allies.

Sincerely,

Margaret Atwood

I really do not see an attack on the victim whatsoever.

maybe people should just stop sign those 'open letter' things. They often feel itchy to me. Like, 5 people are really behind the idea epressed in the particular letter, the rest of the people are either famous 'backers', or people that want to be on this list with famous people themselves...

otoh Atwoods piece in The Globe & Mail seems perfectly reasonable/fine.

I read about Ansari's book, and my first thought was it should be titled, like all Jackson Browne albums, Fuck Me, I'm Sensitive.

that is a bullshit take on Jackson Browne Dr. M

is it tho

yes. all Jackson Browne albums should be titled Fuck Me, David Lindley is Amazing

well the whole band tbh

that was the apology for the open letter, VHS, not the letter itself.

judge for yourself: http://www.ubcaccountable.com/open-letter/steven-galloway-ubc/

This is a local Houston story, but I am curious if similar situations are coming to light w/Theatre Companies in other cities.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Actors-describe-toxic-bullying-atmosphere-during-12492467.php

Similar stories about other theaters have definitely happened, even before the Weinstein moment. Shockingly they seem to have in common a male founder/director around whom the entire company orbits.

i withdraw the cheap Jackson Browne joke, tho Daryl Hannah might not.

Fact of the day(TM): Jackson Brown wrote “these days” when he was 16!

but anyway, the margaret atwood article is probably the best thing i've read about this cultural moment.

why?

As for vigilante justice – condemnation without a trial – it begins as a response to a lack of justice – either the system is corrupt, as in prerevolutionary France, or there isn't one, as in the Wild West – so people take things into their own hands. But understandable and temporary vigilante justice can morph into a culturally solidified lynch-mob habit, in which the available mode of justice is thrown out the window, and extralegal power structures are put into place and maintained. The Cosa Nostra, for instance, began as a resistance to political tyranny.

The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn't get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.

If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won't be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.

this part

especially paragraph 2. she recognizes why this is happening, and why it's good and necessary, but then says that what ultimately needs to happen are actual institutional and legal reforms. it can't just be about accusations and tarnished reputations -- 1.) the public will lose interest eventually and 2.) this doesn't establish the conditions for a better world. atwood also recognizes that the new institutions that are set up are going to need to recognize the rights of the accused to defend themselves, which is a taboo thing to want to focus on right now, but it's the essence of any just system.

otm

Well an important feature of criminal justice is that it must be designed to routinely fail to convict people for lack of evidence, even in a better world where calling the cops is not a miserable and traumatic waste of time for many or most survivors of sexual assault, somehow. I’m more than okay with outing, outrage, and censure continuing indefinitely.

Which is to say, naming, censuring, and firing rapists without being subject to the criminal justice system is good and if it really is a trend it’s making the world more just

I mean of course por que no los dos but yknow I’m just posting online at bedtime

such a gross vacuum. where all the rapists (those on tv) lose their shows, law be damned.

what do you figure when the stakes are actually real? i assume they always are for a victim, especially when so many people who've gone on record to date have stressed how hard it is, how they want it to matter?

i guess more important, what do you do when you're tired of seeing people 'outed in outrage, censured and fired' and it doesn't sate you anymore? it's probably just about as boring as having the bedtime opinion that your cheap idea of justice isn't disgusting.

A middle-aged gay male friend writes on FB:

There is nothing in this account of a night with Aziz Ansari that almost any gay man in New York since the 1960s could not recount again and again.

yes the problem is the way masculinity is taught and learned, that’s pretty obvious

just gonna leave this here

"Apparently there is a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab"

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-humiliation-of-aziz-ansari/550541/

There have been women I dated who were v communicative which has always been my preferred approach but I’ve also dated women who thought it was silly I asked to kiss them or w/e when I thought the signals were unclear, imo it’s not just men who’ve reinforced this idea that men are supposed to “just know” and I don’t say this at all to implicate women but it’s easy for me to imagine certain dudes claiming to “listen to women” while only listening to the ones who told them “I like when a guy just grabs me without asking”. ESP if guys who are dehumanizing women are the types to let one woman’s “truth about women” stand in for all

That article morbs posted seems bad lol

That Atlantic article is getting torched in a lot of places already.

Worth mentioning that a short two months ago — not even, november 22 — that writer, Caitlin Flanagan published a piece titled “To Hell With the Witch-Hunt Debate
The post-Weinstein moment isn’t a war on sex. It’s a long-overdue revolution.”

Obviously there’s been a tipping point of some kind, with people who are in sympathy with the goals of this movement — including Margaret Atwood! — expressing reservations about how this is playing out. You could say that’s “bad lol” if you want I guess but I think it’s worth registering that these critics are not reactionary voices.

Fwiw I have no investment in Aziz Ansari and think his show is terrible and that he was most likely a disrespectful asshole to that woman. But I agree with Flanagan that it’s troubling that anonymous accusers can just torch someone’s reputation like that. It’s at least very different from anything we’ve seen before.

Atwood does articulate well the semantic dismissals of the witch-hunt analogy:

A digression: Witch talk. Another point against me is that I compared the UBC proceedings to the Salem witchcraft trials, in which a person was guilty because accused, since the rules of evidence were such that you could not be found innocent. My Good Feminist accusers take exception to this comparison. They think I was comparing them to the teenaged Salem witchfinders and calling them hysterical little girls. I was alluding instead to the structure in place at the trials themselves.

“Starting to think things went too far when the woman from gone girl did that thing... let’s go back to how things were”

Kinda feel like the onus should be on treeship types to paint a way forward if they’re not happy w the current one! Rather than generically co-signing women standing athwart history and yelling stop. How should this conversation happen that it isn’t? Is “we’ve gone too far” a question worth discussing or should that question be reframed so that it focuses on justice & better treatment of other people? (I haven’t read the Atwood article yet but the Flanagan one is terrible)

Treeship types!

Ugh, Caitlin Flanagan.

apparently we're staying in the weinstein thread

Apparently there is a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab, and who have spent a lot of time picking out pretty outfits for dates they hoped would be nights to remember. They’re angry and temporarily powerful and last night they destroyed a man who didn’t deserve it.

RIP to ansari, he is destroyed

It definitely shouldn’t be me. Flanagan is a feminist writer who was heartily pro me-too but was skeptical of a thing that happened yesterday. That’s someone to listen to, disagree with, whatever, but not just dismiss.

xp deej

Fwiw I have no investment in Aziz Ansari and think his show is terrible and that he was most likely a disrespectful asshole to that woman. But I agree with Flanagan that it’s troubling that anonymous accusers can just torch someone’s reputation like that. It’s at least very different from anything we’ve seen before.

― treeship 2, Monday, January 15, 2018 12:35 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The thing to me is that the torching of his reputation will be softened by the many many ppl who think he might have gotten a raw deal. And let’s say he did, and this girl is a criminal mastermind: is the reason this story is resonating with people because they all know it to be exactly true, or because it’s been true so often and so personally to them that it speaks to something true ? It could be both of course, but if assault’s been covered up millions of times so when one is apparently uncovered it resonates with a lot of people, that says something needs to be discussed in the open, and people will have to have the conversation about the subject. In the context of assault you’re the one complaining about the smashed window in sal’s famous

I think it's unfair that Aziz is in jail for life now

this notion that the accused are "destroyed" is such bullshit. give it a year or two and you'll see how destroyed they are.

Flanagan is a feminist writer

Nope.

caitlin flanagan, feminist writer: https://www.bitchmedia.org/post/douchebag-decree-caitlin-flanagan-our-first-douchebag-all-star

I don’t think ansari getting a raw deal implies that the accuser must be a criminal mastermind, or even that she is making anything up.

"Flanagan is a feminist writer"

uhhhhh

I was mostly looking at her past few articles, which were pro-me too, pro- believing Bill Clinton’s accusers even though it’s politically inconvenient. don’t know that much about her work overall xp

Within minutes of returning, she was sitting on the kitchen counter and he was—apparently consensually—performing oral sex on her (here the older reader’s eyes widen, because this was hardly the first move in the “one night stands” of yesteryear), but then went on, per her account, to pressure her for sex in a variety of ways that were not honorable. Eventually, overcome by her emotions at the way the night was going, she told him, “You guys are all the fucking same” and left crying. I thought it was the most significant line in the story: this has happened to her many times before. What led her to believe that this time would be different?

The bolded part has nothing to do with the subsequent events except here to suggest the apparently consensual oral sex means the rest of the "story" is perhaps suspect.