Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

Therefore, you must believe consent to one thing = consent to all the things.

 

What I believe is that he did not unambiguously say that he grabs women by the genitals without consent, but that is what Politico is writing.

 

They should have held off on knocking Marco Rubio.

Imagine if he had won the nomination and they broke out the news that he owned a fishing boat, and that he and his wife had collected a few traffic tickets over the years, as an October surprise!

 

A person who has agreed to go on a date with you and the evening has progressed to the point of a kiss is not the functional equivalent of a person who is in some sort of professional contact with you and you've closed the door to become alone with them.

Playing dumb or not, it is creepy as hell to make me explain this.

 

It does make you wonder if we've been ruined for future scandals.

You're telling me Senator Slushfund drunkenly crashed his convertable into a tree while leaving his mistress's apartment to go mail off five years of back taxes he forgot to pay? Zzzzzz.

 

This is the equivalent of not calling something theft in print because the guilty party insists they were enthusiastic donations even after multiple complaints.

 

That is an incorrect interpretation.

 

My favorite internet forum for the last few years has been one that is nominally about dating, so this isn't the first time I've seen the "probably autistic guy pretends that he can't possibly understand social context and tries to blur the lines in order to make false equivalences" schitck. This isn't the first time I've seen it this week.

The line between consent and non-consent *can* get a little blurry in some cases. Because of lingering cultural norms that have not quite gone away, you will occasionally have to infer consent for physical contact from social context and body language, and use the reaction to gauge what happens next.

The environments and actions that Trump described in that tape are not anywhere near those situations. The fact that the women have chosen or been forced to be alone with him for business purposes and not social are plenty to differentiate.

 

The guy with a son who has autism accuses someone else of being autistic as a slam.

Nice.

 

I am making a single, extremely narrow point: The comments to Billy Bush were ambiguous enough that Politico should not write, in a straight news story, that he "bragged about sexual assault."

 

It's not a slam. It's a realistic explanation of why some of these people struggle with social norms that shouldn't have to be explained under normal circumstances.

Your argument, much like many of theirs, relies on the fact that the English language is non-specific and contextual enough that literally any sentence can have multiple interpretations. Ordinary people use context to pick the most reasonable interpretation and are comfortable with that. This is a struggle with people on the spectrum, who want the world to fit clearly defined rules with no ambiguity.

The fact that you can come up with alternative meanings that technically fit the words he said are not enough to say that we can't be sure what he said, because context and reasonable inference *are* a part of the English language.

 

This doesn't seem to be all that complicated a thing to understand ...