The Kavanaugh controversy

[yovargas]

What gives you the impression that is a common first reaction?

Listening to people discuss maybe literally every major such accusation I can ever recall?

[River]

The accused is more powerful than the accuser. It begins and ends there.

[Dave_LF]

I genuinely don't understand why so many people's first reaction is to believe that people saying this happened to them are lying. I find that very strange. Of course some people have lied about such things, but why would that be anyone's first assumption about a person? I don't understand.

IMO because in basically all situations, humans have an innate tendency to side with the more powerful person. Especially if the accused is more powerful than you are, because under those circumstances, siding with the accuser is tantamount to picking a fight with a bigger person.

ETA: Or, if I'd read all the way to the end first, I could have just written "what River said"

[elengil]

The accused is more powerful than the accuser. It begins and ends there.

While that is true in the broad social sense, I tend to look at it from a somewhat different angle.

As a parent, who wants to accept that your child has been the victim of something so horrific? It's easier to believe that the child is just acting out, is lying for attention, isn't really being abused by their parent, their sibling, their babysitter, their priest, their coach, the old man who watched you every day when you were a child. And maybe abused you, too. But you don't want to acknowledge that, you don't want to make it real for you, so it can't be real for your child, either.

And then there are other people who want to believe it couldn't ever happen to them because they take all the right precautions, so when it happens to someone else, they aren't a victim, they put themselves in that position. Positions they, of course, would never be in. So it isn't assault, it's bad judgement.

And of course there is how much trust we put in those 'pillars' of the community. Again, priests, coaches, teachers, ... they're good people! Everyone knows they're good people, they wouldn't do anything like that. We all know so-n-so's kid is always making up stories, the kid is the problem, not the pillar of the community!

There are so many ways that our filters prevent us from simply accepting the truth.

[Dave_LF]

Agreed; victim blaming is another thing humans tend to do in virtually all situations. If the victim is at fault you don't have to:
-Admit the system is flawed
-Challenge the powerful
-Change anything

[elengil]

Agreed; victim blaming is another thing that humans tend to do in virtually all situations. If the victim is at fault you don't have to:
-Admit the system is flawed
-Challenge the powerful
-Change anything

Accept you might be a victim some day, too.

[Frelga]

Meanwhile, AP

A massive coalition of U.S. Christian churches attended by 40 million people wants Brett Kavanaugh to withdraw his Supreme Court nomination.

https://apnews.com/amp/53b1f1b71d9a4e589b4109279e414deb

[Voronwë the Faithful]

There is also (as cited in Frelga's link) a rather extraordinary letter signed by over 650 law professors (and counting), of various political persuasion, calling for Kavanaugh to be rejected solely because of his behavior in his testimony last week.

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[yovargas]

The article does mention that that churches group is liberal-leaning which gives it a little bit less impact. Something like that from a conservative church group would make a much bigger statement.

[Cerin]

As I understand it, the Supreme Court is the main reason conservative Christians voted for Trump, so it seems unlikely they would request a withdrawal of the nomination. In fact, I've heard it opined that Republicans fear a low voter turnout if Kavanaugh is not confirmed.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I agree with that.

Overall, this controversy has been a boon for the GOP. I heard on NPR today that the 'enthusiasm gap' between the two parties has been cut from 10 percentage points to a statistically insignificant 2 percentage points. Most likely, the only thing that would reverse that would be if Kavanaugh is not confirmed.

Which I think is highly unlikely.

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[Primula Baggins]

I suspect enthusiasm would also drop significantly if he is confirmed. There won’t be the excitement around rescuing the court from the libs, because it will have been rescued from the libs.

[Frelga]

I don't know about that logic. My understanding is, they are measuring how important the election is to people identifying when each party. Thing is, the Republican base was always going to turn out, and they were always going to vote Republican no matter what. It's the independents that matter, and the polling I've seen seems to indicate that they are not happy about Kavanaugh. 538 mentioned a poll that said that married women, who allegedly lean conservative, swung away from the Republican party recently, but I didn't follow through to see the actual numbers.

In any case, this only matters if 2018 elections are fair and free.

[yovargas]

But 538 has also been reporting that while Republicans are supportive of Trump, they are not enthusiastically supportive. IOW, most of them like him, but not that many love him. Unlike Democrats who don't merely dislike him, they loathe him. That gap in enthusiasm matters when it comes to voter turnout.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It remains to be seen what will happen once Kavanaugh is confirmed. I suspect that the outrage that we have seen so far will be nothing to what we will see then.

[Frelga]

At this point, I feel like telling Nate Silver

[Sunsilver]

Image is not showing on HoF for me, but when I click on it and select 'show image', I get a gif of Han Solo saying: "Never tell me the odds."

Heh. My reaction exactly...

The president says 'this is a very scary time for young men.'

Well, Mr. President, maybe it's time young men woke up and figured out just HOW to avoid being accused of rape or other inappropriate behaviour.

Where's that list of all the things women have been doing for countless years to avoid being raped?

This whole situation makes me want to gag...

[yovargas]

A CBS News/YouGov poll conducted earlier this week found that more voters would be angry than enthusiastic if Kavanaugh was confirmed — but also, more voters would be angry than enthusiastic if Kavanaugh was not confirmed.

[Sunsilver]

That....does not compute!

Do the statistics depend on which news source they are from?

[elengil]

That....does not compute!

Do the statistics depend on which news source they are from?

I think it depends on how you ask the question, or exactly what the options were.

Consider: would you be angry or enthusiastic if Kavanaugh was confirmed?

Let's say 40% say angry, and 20% say enthusiastic, and 40% say they don't care. That's "more angry than enthusiastic" votes.

Then second question: would you be angry or enthusiastic if Kavanaugh was not confirmed?

Maybe we have 30% angry, and 20% enthusiastic and 50% don't care.

In both cases more are angry than enthusiastic based on the single question, but that does not mean all responses taken together show more people would be angry if he was than if he wasn't, or more people would be enthusiastic if he was than if he wasn't. That ratio was not reported.