I'm not sure what you're trying to say. If he did, of course it says something about him. Not every adolescent is capable of jumping a girl, putting their hands over her mouth, and trying to rip their clothes off, drunk or not. It goes far beyond "stupid". At the same time, as I've already said, what absolutely disqualifies him, if it's true, is lying about it and being willing to lie under oath about it, which is a crime in itself. — Baden

Couple of days after those first remarks I'm not sure what my idea was either.

From your remarks I am concerned that you may be presuming that a high degree of compassion (agreeableness) or negative emotion (neuroticism) is a desirable characteristic in a judge. Kavanaugh, if appointed, will have to deal repeatedly with situations that require the suppression or lack of negative emotions, and indeed a disregard for empathy. To be emotionally cold is a desirable characteristic for a supreme court judge. I am confident in asserting this without further discussion.

Second, it happened thirty-something years ago. Every cell in his body has been replaced five times over at this point in time. I don't think you can read anything from this incident (for now I'll just assume it's true), given that he has had an unblemished record since. If he was, shall we say, aggressive and unable to control his sexual urges, it is rather doubtful he could have got this far.

And third, the accusation is not extreme in the slightest. Teenage boys go beyond stupid like that. It's not excusable, but it happens anyway. Instead of being a product of hormones or unchecked aggression and sexual urges, it is the difficulty of abstracting out how to deal with relating to the opposite sex. I would challenge any man who has no such experiences in their past, that they are a damned privileged **** for getting through this task with such ease and no horrible memories to haunt them.

On a related note, I'm not playing for team rep in this. My major interest in American politics is that things ought to get done. Energetic political activity is important to carry the business of a nation in the modern world.

On a related-related note, if I got to be the president for one day, I would argue for a constitutional convention: In the original constitutional framework the federal level of government was not designed to be in charge of major policy making. It was made to be inflexible and inefficient with the embedded idea that major political activity should take place in the individual states. The civil war changed this and the federal became sovereign, and for 150 years America has had a serious organisational fault at the heart of it's politics.

Cultural, spiritual, philosophical, political and societal movement beginning around the 15th century, that placed the individual human being with special emphasis on his capacity for thought, as the center piece of responsibility for the development of the shared human condition within and across societies.

Embodied especially in artistic and philosophical works, applied to politics and governance, the seed of the scientific and industrial revolutions, and with a celebrated connection to ancient cultures.

Some enlightenment personae in no particular order: Erasmus, Montaigne, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Luther, Da Vinci, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo, Brahe, Newton, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, De Tocqueville, Kant, Hegel, Clausewitz, Smith, Mill. (I just realised I'm not going to try and list everyone who deserves to be included, I do not have the capacity for that task)

I think it's fairly arbitrary, but there is a certain kind of loss of innocence from there on out in western philosophy, Marx, Nietsche, Weber, Schmidt and Arendt for example are hard to place in the same sphere with those above. In my mind a key task of philosophy now is to find a new connection to this lost innocence of free flowing unburdened thought from previous centuries, kind of the way these classic enlightenment figures sought connection with the ancient world.

The discovery of the unconscious mind of psychology and neurology is a complete new frontier in itself, and definitely marks out the beginning of a new phase in philosophy and society. Great many things are changing and a new enlightenment maybe about to begin right now.

Finland. Helsinki area.

We've a Trump-esque controversy right now with a wacky populist foreign minister who attended anti-abortion rallies in Argentina, on an official business trip, and claims that he is allowed to do so as a matter of freedom of religion. In violation of the nation's international political stand. Elections next spring will see this particular asshole out of power permanently. The populist wave that brought him to power broke into pieces a while ago.



Thanks for the criticism. I wasn't particularly precise about what I meant. The famous political line "I misspoke" comes to mind. To be more precise I would say that it's an extremely transparent accusation. No original report or investigation, a supposed crime from 35 years ago when the accused and the accuser were 17 years of age? How is that meant to reflect anything at all with respect to judge Kavanaugh?

The extraordinary thing about it is the tie in to adolescent sexual behavior. Everyone knows kids do extremely stupid things at that age, but to come out and say that in the current media-environment would be akin to an outright endorsement of rape-culture among adolescents. That is the trap. I admit it sounds a bit conspiratorial, but politics in these meaningless tidbits of media soundbites often is that way.

The other cases of sexual misconduct you lay out are far more serious, and as far as I can tell (I'm not that well informed of the individual cases), they seem to concern politicians, not judges. Politicians who hold pieces of sovereign power often engage in dubious sexual behaviour as they have so much opportunity for it. Recall Kissinger's famous words on the subject? They do need to be watched carefully, and even under the lens they get away with shit like you wouldn't believe.

@VagabondSpectre @ChatteringMonkey

Hey excuse me, I'm kind of just passing by, posting randomly and being new here.

I think what you both are overlooking is what humans actually do with their existence, which is to reproduce, replicate old self-sustaining behaviors and display idiosyncratic behavior leading to both death with deep unhappiness(the risk) and newly discovered ways of perpetuating their being(the reward). The newly discovered ways of being over time become established and normal.

What allows us to think that happiness is continuously occurring is the observation whether human being is able to perpetuate itself(the culture he and she is embedded in continues to evolve and survive). This alone is a sufficient test of the goodness of being as per the Myth of Sisyphus (there is nothing a human being likes so much as perpetuating existence, therefore being able to do so makes a human population happy).

We are thus confronted only by two very practical questions: (1)Does the expansion of the ways of human being pose a threat to the perpetuation of culture as a whole? (2)If yes, how much risk is justified?

Conceptually it is easy to see that an expansive human culture may well consume itself. There is a link from this debate to religiosity. There is a link from here to political philosophy too. But the conceptual clarity we can impose now is, that economic development is a baseline that enables being. As such it is an absolute good. At least in so far as it does not saw off the tree branch we are sitting on. How good the actual existence we obtain is, is defined by our mastery of being(educational, political, religious etc).

A secondary/tertiary point I might claim is, that to the best of our knowledge, our universe is finite, the clock is ticking on us and all future us'es(Tony Stark, how do you spell that?), and as such some risk to the whole of culture is justified in attempts to expand it.

Hey, I am a new member here. The sign up process was blissfully short, cheers.


The issue of Kavanaugh seems to be an attempt by the dems to get reps to trip up, come out strong in favor of a supposed rapist and to be able to play this card in elections now and in two years time.

Regardless of whether there is substance in those accusations, it is a minefield for the reps to express anything and it is also difficult not to say something. So considering the counterfactuals, this is some very neat political media-play by the dems.

The fact that the accusations play so neatly for team democratic makes me think the accusations are most likely unfounded.

I doubt this will actually stop Kavanaugh's confirmation, but if it does it's a sky-fall moment for the reps. That in itself makes this even more important to handle properly, and something that a typically impulsive move might ruin. It's an almost perfect play, and as such almost certainly the accusations aren't substantive.

I'm from northern europe. I watch American politics out of.. I don't know why I do it exactly. There is a kind of experience of Meaning in it, which I don't think is illusory.