Thank you 538

@puzzlepiece87 Surveys should also note that the 1.4% for men is almost definitely underreported because of cultural stigma surrounding male rape victims.

> Mnuchin: Republicans haven't lost the messaging war on Trump's tax law

gl with that buddy

@Yuuki The 18% figure for women is probably too low for the same reason

I doubt that it's anywhere near the 18% of women simply because rape is in part an abuse of power and the fact of the matter is that men are more often in positions of power than women.

But underreporting is definitely a thing when it comes to rape statistics.

blinks

I...okay:

@Yuuki don't forget about male on male abuse, i.e. the entire church scandal

@Wipqozn And that bothers me a lot because 18% is already a scary high number.

@Wipqozn @TimStone whoa whoa, don't leave out that Hatch was part of the Clarence Thomas confirmation process despite his sexual harassment of Anita Hill! He's not just some old dude! Grassley today = Hatch 30 years ago!

@TimStone Orrin Hatch is such a terrible person, he makes Hatch green chiles look bad.

tbf Grassley was also on the Judiciary Committee during Thomas' confirmation

no

@Ash I mean, American politics have pretty much strained anyone who doesn't toe the party line out of office by now. Sooooo if a party line is monstrous, it's fair to say....

@Unionhawk tl;dr

many people have been saying this for a long time

> Ford has an impressive background. She opened up her statement by saying she is terrified, which makes sense. But what if she came in and said she was angry? Or numb and matter of fact? What if she didn’t have such an impressive professional resume? What if she were a person who works a low-wage job instead of a professor of psychology? What if she were a woman of color? It’s important for us to think about how we perceive the individuals who report sexual assault and misconduct.

Thank you again 538

@Ash You're exactly right, At the same time, I'm also grateful that a prominent news outlet is adding its voice in support. Especially on the same day as NYT Opinion, I'm glad not everyone's being shitty.

@Ash extremely well put

@Ash Agreed extremely well put.

@Ash I'm sorry many don't care about the issue. I'm sorry for all the pain.

@Ash I think your reaction is smart/likely closest to the truth.

@Ash Thank you

@Ash you gotta do what gives you life, whenever

> Watching this, I’m reminded that prosecutors are used to telling a story — building momentum, creating a narrative. It is very difficult to do that in chopped-up five-minute time segments.

Re: Mitchell questioning Ford

yeah, both limiting to 5 minutes and bringing in a "lady assistant" to question dr. ford were chickenshit moves on the GOP's part, and they are backfiring spectacularly

^ For those in the room who dislike relative y axis work, I agree for the above graph. Makes it look like a pretty steep decline. Wouldn't so much on 0-100% scale.

I agree that it is a relatively steep decline though.

Most people just don't care about this level of inside politics.

I think net support is % who approve - % who disapprove. So 0 means that an equal number of people approve and disapprove

think of 0 like 50% approve, 50% disapprove basically

@murgatroid99 Exactly.

So basically approval has gone from 55% to 47%. Eyebrow raising but not falling off a cliff by any means

And Trump's rating is 41%.

@puzzlepiece87 That's not exactly how it works, because you have to account for "no opinion/did not answer"

@murgatroid99 Yup, just trying to ELI5 unless someone wants more detail, but you're exactly right.

Thank you 538 for "The Republicans" instead of "The committee"

Speaking of ~10% swings, betting markets have the chance for Kavanaugh to fail the nomination process at 60%, up from 50%

Holy hell

Ah. Well. That is not all he said, either

Shorter Johnson (R): "What the hell Grassley"

@Ash These people are just full on awful

@TimStone what teh fuck is wrong with him

@Ash yep

@GodEmperorDune I'm not sure, I certainly won't say he was good before but he seems to have nose-dived even further lately

Like just straight up #yolo

Ah, of course

I was wondering where they had materialized from

lol

yes

@Unionhawk Yeah, we covered that above

@Ash yes

The best part of this is that it's not even a t-shirt, like they straight up made a men's polo

@TimStone see i didn't want to poke fun at this because its kinda gender presentationy and that is a terfy business

Yeah, though given they're from Liberty University I wouldn't put too much stock in that concern for this particular situation

But I mostly just don't get why they, specifically, have this polo

The women had t-shirts

@Ash yeah, i get the feeling it is not done in good faith

@TimStone dafuq?

We should be standing for who we are? Like how you stood up for your family, Cruz?

@Ash Yup, the line is from a politics betting site, so they have lines for all elected candidates, prominent nominees, prominent bills, etc.

@Ash They have a bus

@TimStone The person who told him

@Ash I'm personally not a fan of industrialized gambling, but yes capitalism does have some funny self-parody moments. Separately, I do appreciate that betting venues provide accurate, predictive data, because I'm a data person.

It's actually even worse than was framed in the original tweet

@puzzlepiece87 I prefer free-range organic gambling.

The industrial process is just too cruel to the books.

@Yuuki I get your organic joke. Separately and since I don't think industrialized gambling is a widespread concept, I was using it in the sense of "doing all the stuff to specifically try to get you addicted and continuing to do it" like no windows/clocks so you can't tell what time of day it is.

Like, even though this is just a dream and not ever in reality anywhere, I guess I'm mostly okay with gambling as a concept if you strip all the exploitation out of it. Such a thing would probably involve everyone paying $10 at the door, not being able to cash out, and getting monopoly money to play with inside or something.

Flake looks like he's really hoping he doesn't have to take a stand for anything and Cruz looks like he's thinking about soup

No, bad 538. Stop galaxy braining stupid stuff.

@Ash Yeah, that's Flake, heh

@TimStone soup freshly steamed human ear-piercing remains

@Ash Nah, there are so many of them it's hard for anyone to keep track honestly

I spend far too much time with stuff than is good for me

smh, assuming that Cruz eats human food for dinner

He has a strange obsession with Campbell's Soup

@TimStone Well, it's probably the only food he saw on the radio waves he intercepted as he journeyed towards our solar system.

@Ash I'm already horrified by that one guy who "pierced" his cheeks.

It didn't help that the post mentioned that he has the world record for most "flesh tunnels".

shudders

Both because they'd look horrible and I doubt Mitchell was able to get through most of her prepared questions due to the format

I just noticed the last name of one these people has the last name crapo

@Ash I mean, there are a lot of gun-pierced ears in the world because for some reason most people are way more comfortable with gun piercing than with needle piercing even though it's completely terrible

We actually had to convince my mom to go to a professional needle piercer rather than getting her ears gunned, and my sister still swears by gun piercings D:

Yeah, what??

Mitchell has basically just started down the path of "Ah, actually maybe we should have an investigation because this format is pointless"

I don't even understand what's going on here

@TimStone Maybe they just become self aware

No she seems to have somehow been trying to blame Ford for not letting them come to her to do an interview, or something?

Very weird

Like it doesn't make any sense, Grassley didn't have to do this this way

I'm so glad I'm going to the store soon because I can't be here for Kavanaugh running his damn mouth

> Cory Booker is the ultimate “Actually, this is more of a comment than a question” guy.

I'm curious if the GOP senators will ask him questions directly? Because that'll be a hell of a contrast

> Well, I guess maybe part of Corey Booker’s strategy was to give Ford a break from talking in between her sessions of questioning from Mitchell, but uh, that was also a nice little moment for him to grandstand.

Heh yes. He's my favorite but both are true :P

Christ this is crumbling

> Yeah, if speechifying during your five minutes tells us anything about who’s running for president, then it looks like Booker and Harris are running and Klobuchar isn’t.

I can't wait to shoot myself in the foot when I find out what kind of garbage Ted Cruz spewed out for his five minutes.

@ToxicFrog I wish we had taken my daughter somewhere that uses the gun piercing

We took her somewhere that everywhere we knew said was amazing that used needles instead of the gun and it was awful

To hellllll with ye

@TimStone Love too be in total control of the process and egg your own face. You're done, Lindsey Graham.

@SaintWacko awful how?

@TimStone You probably won't be able to avoid it, but if you really do intend to stay away from Kavanaugh's testimony for your own good, I recommend you double down on your commitment to that. The opening statement is not looking good.

> Prominent evangelical leaders have already dismissed the allegations against Kavanaugh . A Marist poll from earlier this week showed that 48 percent of white evangelical Protestants would support Kavanaugh even if the allegations were true.

Please make like the herd of pigs, white evangelicals, and get into the sea.

lmfao

SEC is moving to ban Elon from being an officer of a public company

That's great :D

SEC v Elon Musk, southern district of NY

@Unionhawk Wow

I think "officer" in this context refers to positions like CEO, CFO, COO, etc.

@murgatroid99 @Ash Yup, exactly what murgatroid. I'm not sure exactly of the specifics but I think officers are those who have legal responsibility/are legally liable for (financial or other material) statements by corporations. For example, a CFO is legally responsible for mistakes on an annual statement (financial statement to shareholders), regardless of who actually types in the numbers. The CFO must certify it. So basically any kind of certifying position is what I'm guessing.

@Ash Tesla is definitely public, SpaceX is private I believe, and I believe the Boring Company is private also.

@Ash ELI5: He would not be able to hold powerful jobs in companies traded on the stock market.

So thinking ahead, this could do two things:

1. Get him kicked out of Tesla, one of his three companies

2. Basically cut him off from any venture capital for future companies

So Elon is basically not allowed to be involved with step 3, Profit, if this goes through. Since that's the most important step, no one will want to invest with him again.

I'd say it's a medium amount. He does love to start new companies, but he's 47

And Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring all have a lot of doing ahead

So I guess you could argue he could feasibly finish all of them up in like 10-12 years and then start 3 more?

@Ash He made illegal statements on Twitter saying he was taking Tesla (a public company) private, causing stock price fluctuations, which cause people to lose money, which they get mad about.

the "Taking Tesla private, funding secured thing", right?

That's the one

@Vogel612 Exactly.

> Graham, yelling, if you’re “looking for a fair process, you came to the wrong town at the wrong time!”

2018 wew

@puzzlepiece87 It's like he's self-aware but for the wrong reasons.

@Vogel612 Nice to see you drop in for a comment again :)

shush, I'm only lurking ... ~hides in the corner

totally unrelatedly, but possibly of interest:

The German gov is pretty shaky recently

what with the regular internal strife and the majority party disagreeing with Merkel and Seehofer

@Ash I don't want to know what he's yelling, do I?

@Vogel612 Agreed, we were worrying about AfD the other day.

@Yuuki @Ash @TimStone I know what he's yelling and you're better off skipping it.

Betting lines have returned to their original positions, 50% likely to be confirmed.

@Ash Thanks for sharing today, I always appreciate your input. I know it has been a very painful day.

@Unionhawk Be still my beating heart, for this is the most Online anyone has certainly ever been

@murgatroid99 it's more than just that, for example my mom's job title is secretary (which at my company corresponds to "officer level manager below assistant vice president" for some reason)

But essentially

It's probably defined by a particular company's articles of incorporation

> "Executive officer" means the president, any vice president in charge of a principal business unit, division or function (such as sales, administration or finance), any other officer who performs a policy making function, or any other person who performs similar policy making functions for the issuer.

@TimStone Oh goody

@TimStone Can't stay away :D

I just got home and they can all go straight to hell

@TimStone SilasWhippingSelfDaVinciCode.gif

@GodEmperorDune If Kavanaugh wasn't name-dropped, I would've thought this tweet was about Trump.

@Ash EXACTLY

🙄

@TimStone hue

@Ash and if a lady doesn't act like this then "well she's not upset about it so clearly it was not that big of a deal"

He testified that it was a drinking game, so naturally

@TimStone and all the people you fucked up are never getting their lives back, so...

mmm we all already know the questions you wanted to ask Clinton now my dude you're a sick puppy

Indeed it is not

@TimStone I mean, technically speaking you still have your reputation. It's just a different one now.

But yeah funny how Mitchell got sidelined isn't it?

@Yuuki Technically correct is the best kind of correct.

She's still there, just, you know, they're no longer interested in her asking anything

@TimStone they are just making her wait? dafuq?

Hatch ceded his time to her THEN TOOK IT BACK to say some more stupid crap

He can't even do that

jeez

I suppose Republicans demanding a woman ask questions for them and then proceeding to ignore her entirely is about par for their behavior.

They're the ones that wanted her present, right?

@Yuuki You know that she asked all the questions during Republican time during the Ford portion, right?

@puzzlepiece87 Ah, so she's still there for the Kavanaugh part, they're just not ceding any time to her?

jfc

@Yuuki Exactly. Politically, Mitchell's purpose was to avoid any bad optics/mistakes by old, white, male Republican senators during Ford questioning. But the thinking is that since Kavanaugh is being questioned now, the risk is lower and they can resume business as usual.

Even now the Republican senators are slamming everyone BUT Ford, they're clearly sticking to the strategy.

They're trashing her lawyers, polygraph funders, other accusers not in the room, Avenatti, Democrats, etc.

Prediction markets: K 56% likely to be confirmed.

@TimStone how did this jerk get confirmed as a judge the first time?

@GodEmperorDune It wasn't 2016+ then

@GodEmperorDune The same way he's going to get confirmed this time, blatant lying.

So it might be a borderline on if this is considered news, but I stumbled across this today via /r/subredditdrama, and it's highly relevant to the Kavanaugh case and just sexual assault in society in general. It's a fairly fantastic post that dispels a lot of the myths and BS around people who promote false rape accusations as some serious and huge problem: reddit.com/r/MensLib/comments/9hraly/…

Everything is partisan af now.

@Yuuki Well said.

Ahhh so memories of 35 years ago aren't unreasonable now

k

IT essentially breaks down just how rarely it happens, it proves that the reasons people say they happen (i.e. to discredit a man) are pure bullshit, and also proves that the "Studies" which show false rape accusations are high are either just pure bad science BS, or are using data back when police thought any woman they considered to be a "slut" was just making it up.

Oh and also that the idea it's some huge problem is basically just a tactic used by anti-woman hate groups

I'm not sure I like that the Innocence Project was brought into this, although I haven't finished reading this post.

False convictions are not necessarily false accusations.

@Yuuki Sure, but even with that, the numbers are extremely low.

And I'm pretty sure that was only brought in to be like "This is literally the highest number which could be considered reliable that I could find"

Because looks like he originally listed 52 until someone linked that

So is /r/MensLib like a not terrible /r/MensRights?

@Yuuki Seems to be yeah

I haven't heard of the sub before today

@TimStone I mean, I guess that's efficiency given that this administration wasn't going to be using the office in the first place.

But I'm surprised they didn't install like some rich guy's nephew for some bonus illegal cash flow.

Anyways, I thought that was a good read, and I'm certainly going to keep it handy to throw at people who go on about false accusations as being some real problem to be concerned about.

@TimStone oh ffs

who needs science when we're making scientific policy

@Yuuki Easier to keep people from saying forbidden words like science if you don't have an office named after one. taps head

@Ash Yeah I was happy someone mentioned it in r/SRD because until now I've always said "this isn't a thing to be worried about at all" but I never had the data to back it up, just like, common sense.

And well, data is good to have when you want to throw it at someone

All right y'all, time to go home. I'm sorry today was so painful, my best wishes for everyone who is hurting.

@Ash This and Tim Stone's continued intact veins and abidance by the CoC :P

@Ash You can have any bourbon I find.

I'm not a drinker but bourbon chicken is delicious as well.

@Wipqozn Until I read a similar analysis a few years ago, I did think it was something to worry about. It really helped to see all of those statistics to properly frame the issue.

@murgatroid99 Yeah data like this really helps to educate people who are open minded

Going back to my Ted Cruz post from earlier:

He can't even answer that question directly

Beto, I’m already going to vote for you. If you keep this up, I’m going to end up naming my child after you.

Probably because it's currently the most likely date that this would have taken place, given their behaviour toward Mitchell when she asked him about it and the people listed 🤷

Ah, correction, he apparently did mutter "yeah"

And they're done. Screw everything

@TimStone Did they grill him even nearly as hard as they did Ford?

You already know the answer

@TimStone Yeah but I was hoping I didn't

throws up hands

love to lie all the time without repercussions

@GodEmperorDune you have a promising future in the Republican party then

At least until they are all guillotined

@TimStone I have to point out, if you follow the links, that the WSJ quoted an unnamed aide, and edited after Kavanaugh's own statement

I'll retract in that case. I'm skeptical he didn't catch it regardless if it was on, but I wasn't there

The updated WSJ statement said that he was spending the time doing his own preparation instead

Or, rather, that that's what he said he was doing

Right, just presumably in the same room? But I'm not sure

Like "Ah no I wasn't watching the TV I was preparing!" is what it sounds like but without some more detail it's hard to say one way or another

So retracting on that basis

Watch them somehow convince Manchin to vote yes for no particular reason

Just to top off this farce

It's going to be a 52 I think

Maybe a 51

Don

Maybe sit this one out buddy

lol gtfo

Because also that isn't true don

Me: abolish prisons

Also me: don should be in prison

"Hmm he very well could have committed sexual assault, but I'm not sure! Maybe we should confirm him anyway!" is quite a leap of logic

Just say "whatever I don't care" and be done with it