That is a good article!
People are confusing and foolish. That's my conclusion.
Independent of the rest, this boggles the mind: "Under military law, a threesome is considered an indecent act -- a serious crime."
I'm just flabbergasted by the balls to beg the Washington Post to spend years digging in the weeds of past accusations to exonerate you for the things you *know* you done actually did. This dude miraculously and against all precedent and practice saved his six-fig income and cushy pension. Then had the entitlement or megalomania to desperately seek out the national investigative reporters that would strip it all away from him. Just so damn apropos of the current pig-headed brokenness of our so-called meritocrasy. Failures of elite accountability rot our society from the inside out until the truth feels like slander.
These dudes all be like, "What is this Kafka-esque nightmare of Actual Justice?!?" And honestly, they are probably completely justified in feeling surprised and blindsided by accountability.
3: That was completely crazy.
The miraculous reappearing cell phone seems very fishy to me. But I can't come up with a theory that makes any sense.
4. Lol. Please allow me to also ruin the ending of the 9000 word Post story I requested they run on how I managed a passing grade in 12th grade English.
I'm getting whiplashed between hating him for his "stars and Skirts" BS and the revelation that the prosecutor straight-up lied about interviewing the mother and brother.
OK, got to the end. Damn. Glad about the justice, still annoyed at the prosecutor. "Memory lapse" my ass.
"Stadler put on a black-and-white dress with yellow accents and a matching fedora"
The system works but the city must be burned to the ground.
Yeah 3 really gets me too. Like I don't even enjoy getting away with things because I'm anxious about the fact that it could have gone wrong (even though it didn't). This kind of hubris is perhaps the furthest thing from my personality possible.
This plus the fiasco of the Guantanamo tribunals confirms that US military lawyers are among the most incompetent people on the planet. And yet they have amazingly good media coverage.
|| I was reading this opinion -- the SC declined the opportunity to reverse it today -- and got to looking at the composition of the 8th Circuit. There are 10 regular and 7 senior judges. (And one vacancy). Guess how many were appointed by Democratic presidents? One. And she's the one who wrote the transparently correct dissent in the linked opinion. |>
3: Yeah, that was the big thing that struck me about the article in the first place - that entitled sense that keeps some of these guys from realizing "Hey, you got a really lucky break here even though there are aspects that you think are unfair. Lots of more disadvantaged people would love to be in the position you are right now. Don't rock the boat further - this could get a lot worse for you if you push it."
I do wonder if his girlfriend may have played a role in encouraging him to go to the press - outraged defense of the guy she *knows* got railroaded. Maybe he couldn't think of a good enough excuse to give her for not going to the press that didn't amount to "Hey, honey, you know that crazy chick who claimed she slept with me the night you were with me the whole time? Actually I was banging her behind your back all along."
***
I've seen that sense of white male entitlement with a former friend I tried to help. He had been a successful entrepreneur who had sold his former company for millions and wound up broke and living with his mom years later, partly due (I think) to some undiagnosed mental health issues he refused to acknowledge or seek treatment for. I had found him a job opportunity as an individual contributor in his specialty, and he flew out for an interview that went pretty well. They got into serious negotiations over the job, and the recruiter he was working with had named a specific figure the company was prepared to offer - $150K/year.
That's when things blew up. He considered the offer an insult. He told me "That's what they pay starting college grads at Google" (not at all true when I was at Google a few years previous), and he tried to use a non-existent job negotiation with another company to negotiate the offer higher. When the recruiter told him that he should certainly take the other job if that was on offer, he acknowledged that he didn't yet have an offer from the other company (he didn't even have management there offering him an interview) and told the recruiter "well, at least this is better than nothing."
He was absolutely devastated a few days later when the recruiter told him the company had decided to go with another candidate on a H1-B visa instead. I told him "Dude, you all but told them you didn't really want the job, and would be out of there at the first opportunity, and they decided to go with someone who actually wanted the job and who they could be sure would stick around for at least 3-4 years to get a green card. What did you expect?" But even though he had been telling me a few days earlier all the reasons this job was really beneath him and he wanted something else, he was fuming at the injustice of offering the job to an H1-B visa holder when a US citizen was "available," and spent weeks trying to get the company to reconsider instead of looking for other opportunities that might still be available to him.
It's a shame. That job would have given him a chance to dig his way out of the financial hole he had gotten himself into, and offered good mental health benefits if he had been willing to try and deal with his issues. But he persisted in blaming everyone but himself for the fiasco. The only part he blamed himself for was not insisting on negotiating directly with the hiring manager instead of the recruiter, sure that his business acumen would have negotiated a more successful deal. I can only imagine how badly it would have gone if he had gotten that wish, given how much he was misreading how other people perceived him.
White male entitlement can be one hell of a drug.
16: It occurs to me that some people might feel a little uncomfortable about some details I'm sharing about my friend's condition. He is now beyond any further help or hurt I can give him. He committed suicide last year after screwing up his life even further, and alienating nearly all his remaining friends and family who were still trying to help him, including me. Under the circumstances, I don't feel obliged to keep my conversations with him confidential, beyond a few details that might hurt people who are still living. Rather, I think it is useful for me to offer as honest an assessment of him as I can, in the hopes that it may be helpful to others.
World Mental Health Day was earlier this week, which includes an effort to educate people about mental illness and the associated stigmas. Certainly the stigma against mental illness played a role in my friend's decisions not to seek diagnosis and treatment. Some of it was just denial, but he was also convinced that if he got an official diagnosis he would have to list it on every employment application going forward and no one would hire him. He wouldn't accept my explanation that no, he wouldn't have to list it on an application, and there were legal protections for people who are being treated, but not (as far as I know) for people whose untreated condition causes them to come across as such a jerk or flake during an interview/negotiation that other people decide they just don't want to work with them.
It's a sad situation, and I'm sorry it turned out the way it did, but a lot of it was his own bad decision-making and privilege blinders, and refusing to listen to advice that didn't line up with what he already wanted to do.
16/17: I'm sorry about your friend. That can be so difficult to watch without being able to fix.
The article was good. I really appreciate journalists who actually, y'know, investigate. I saw so saddened by a inlaw who was lamenting the "lack of evidence" on Kavanaugh. It rang true how Stadler asked what her motivation would have been to lie. And remembering the phone. Easy to imagine myself in her shoes. Easy to imagine myself in a lot of those women's shoes.
Yeah, hooboy, 16/17 is an intense thing to watch someone distinstegrate like that.
16/17 - There are protections and there aren't. Getting treatment and not being dead from suicide would clearly be better, but unfortunately a lot of the protections aren't great. For example, getting time off to go to therapy once a week might be hard for somebody who works in a job requiring shifts like a nurse.
"tried to use a non-existent job negotiation with another company to negotiate the offer higher."
Did we talk about the chemistry prof here or at the other place?