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[Reelya]

idk, but I followed the link in the Guardian. Jezebel has more info on the story, because they tried to sell the story to Gawker. The writer at Jezebel then talked to some of the people involved.

The claimant in the Trump rape lawsuit in California, a Ms. Johnson. Her residential address cited in the court documents turns out to be a foreclosed house who's last occupant is a guy who died over 1 year ago. On top of the lawsuit being improperly filed because the "lawyer" didn't have the first clue of how to file a lawsuit, thus didn't cite any actual statutes that might apply, it was finally rejected because the mail was returned since the postal address wasn't valid. Current lawyer (who only does patents) for the case has indicated to journalists that the NY lawsuit is indeed the same person.

And Jezebel note that the full accusations are "cinematic" in their depravity and weirdness:

“The first time that I met Donald Trump was at a party at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion. I was 13,” she says. “He basically asked if I could come over and give him a hand job.” She pauses for several long moments. “Sorry, this is a little difficult. But um, before I gave him a hand job he kinda slapped my hand away and said, ‘You need to use a glove.’ Tiffany ran over and said, ‘no one touches Mr. Tump’s penis without a glove.’”

Sure, I'll take any accusation at face value. But I can only take this load of crap at face-palm value. Jezebel describe the full set of accusations as "almost cinematic in their depravity".

[Flying Dice]

The timing and associations are suspicious as shit, yeah. That said, even if this particular instance is probably a tabloid frame-job, Trump is on the record lusting after his own daughter. Just a bit more scummy than being a tubby, balding Kennedy wannabe.

Besides, the real headline of the week is "Trump Stumped by Waifu: Slovenian Describes Plagiarism as 'Recreativity'".

[Reelya]

The other thing the Jezebel people found out was that the publicity trail went back to Steven Baer. He's been described as a "conservative mega-donor". And he's vehemently anti-Trump. So I think the real story is that some publicity hounds have found a way to make bucks off this thing by courting rich Anti-Trump right-wingers.

mediaite.com wrote about Trump's weird thing for his daughter, pointing out that Trump's purported favorite book - The Bible - isn't down with incest. I beg to differ. For a start, who did cain and abel beget with? Trump's a logical guy, he's taking the Old Testament to heart.

[NullForceOmega]

There are heterosexual males that don't lust after Ivanka?

[Rolepgeek]

As terrible a person as Trump is, I'm pretty sure he's the mundane sort of terrible. The combination of farce and reality that makes it so awfully true as to non-ignorable. Sleazy, but with his own weird twisted sense of honor and of how to play the game. I don't know if I'm making any sense.

I mean, besides the whole innocent until proven guilty, thing.

I'm really sad that this even came up, because if it's true, it's awful and the flames of controversy over just about everything will be fanned that much higher. If it's not, it's a high profile case of someone falsifying a rape accusation for political gain, which is going to be a tremendous boost for all the...people...who refuse to believe people when they say they've been raped.

So basically if this was faked whoever did it is a terrible person who has made life harder for millions of women down the line in an underhanded attempt to swing the elections.

Luckily this is one of the areas where the american press is actually pretty good... if it gets to work.

Define 'good'. Covers it fairly and accurately, or obsesses over it for weeks and weeks at the expense of all else?

I have much less confidence in media outlets, of basically all kinds, than I used to. Realities of their situation.

[mainiac]

Luckily this is one of the areas where the american press is actually pretty good... if it gets to work.

Define 'good'. Covers it fairly and accurately, or obsesses over it for weeks and weeks at the expense of all else?

The press will dig deep if it digs at all.  They may not report in a particularly accurate way but the truth is generally out there.

[Rolepgeek]

I suppose. I mostly just get frustrated with, essentially, the hype, which buries the truth further, half the time.

[Frumple]

Bloody hell that site caused twilight (tablet f.lux equivalent) to crash. It's not unknown t'me for that to happen, but it's gotta' be a horrendously badly designed webpage, generally.

... unsurprisingly, I've been finding news sites break things on this kindle more than a... lot of other stuff. I still have to trouble quite understanding how they can be so consistently terrible.

Apropos of nothing, I guess, but it seems equitable to shit upon that which shits upon my computer

[misko27]

I'm consistently amazed at how deeply unstable and technically idiotic newsites are. I mean really, there's no excuse for being consistently terrible. One of these days I will open up the page source on one of these really nasty sites and see just how stupid some of these really are.

[Starver]

News-sites do have a lot of scripting and such.  Probably to many different revenue-generation potentials (user profiling to sell the data, sponsored links to other places wanting clickfalls, etc) and I can't fault them as they're having to replace (or emulate, in the case of news places that have only ever been digital from the off) hardcopy sales to support their reportage abilities.

But I wish they'd do so less obtrusively.

[Baffler]

For your consideration.

That was pretty interesting.

Conformity, and national unity, used to be pretty important to the average person. We only had a couple TV channels, and they all tended to report on the same things and with less open ideological slant (though we had plenty of selective reporting, that isn't nearly as visible or polarizing, and the media was a lot more ready to self-regulate and self-censor back then.) People disagreed, obviously, but the ideological band was a lot more narrow and predictable. It wasn't as easy for the average person to keep an eye on what the people in charge were doing, either. Our society is more open and pluralistic now, after all that stuff in the 70's and 80's the article talks about.

So maybe the problem isn't that the Republican and Democratic parties can't maintain discipline anymore, but that the Democratic and Republican parties aren't up to the task of being the big tops anymore. They've always been coalitions, more or less, but with their carrots and sticks not carroting or sticking like they used to, it may well be a pointless effort to try to hold them together in their current forms. I don't know what the new party lines would look like, but I do believe having smaller, more ideologically narrow organizations in Washington would lend some stability. Compromise could then be collective, rather than on the historical individual level, so the Republican party's libertarian wing doesn't have to worry about losing their seats to the religious right within their own party.

[Flying Dice]

For your consideration.

Personally I find this to be a more... insightful discussion topic rather than 22 year old allegations of child abuse against someone practically immune to allegations about anything; allegations which are tenuous at best.

The author opens with two No True Scotsman claims, one for each party. They then go on to demonstrate an astonishing lack of awareness of our political history by suggesting that strong alignment with party leadership--a trend which is at best thirty years or forty years old and directly responsible for the collapse of the strong spirit of inter-party cooperation and individual responsibility which allowed the government to conduct business smoothly and members of Congress to vote according to the demands of their constituents or consciences--is both normal and desirable.

Thirty seconds of investigation shows that the author specializes in criticism of government social policy. So yes, as expected, a reactionary panic piece from a journalist who hasn't made any particular study of our political system or history. Because we don't have enough of those floating around already from every gorram corner of our idiotic press corp.

Here's a decent Pew piece on party polarization. When I studied American elections a few years back, I happened across some even more dramatic data that went back to the '50s, and there was basically no distinction between parties as a whole--you had fringe Democrats voting almost as far to the right as right-fringe Republicans and vice-versa. This is one of the crucial problems with our contemporary Congress and it's painful to watch people act as if extreme party polarization and strong alignment with party leadership is normal and healthy behavior for our system. The last time we had divisions this strong was in the lead-up to the Civil War, which is a large part of why I think that the fragmentation we're currently seeing is ultimately healthy in the long run.

[Max™]

Something I saw pointed out a while ago... how old are the ones Trump goes after for wives generally? What's a few years either way when youre a couple decades older than someone, right?

There are heterosexual males that don't lust after Ivanka?

/

Bloody hell that site caused twilight (tablet f.lux equivalent) to crash. It's not unknown t'me for that to happen, but it's gotta' be a horrendously badly designed webpage, generally.

... unsurprisingly, I've been finding news sites break things on this kindle more than a... lot of other stuff. I still have to trouble quite understanding how they can be so consistently terrible.

Apropos of nothing, I guess, but it seems equitable to shit upon that which shits upon my computer

Yeah that site is awful, the font is triple scaled despite my using scripts to force everything to abide by my rules, I dread seeing what colors they use natively (hah hah, fuck you webdesigners, white text on grey everywhere!) and there are tons of dead space on the sides of the screen as though it were a mobile site or something, stopped reading after a couple lines to kill the tab.

[Baffler]

Something I saw pointed out a while ago... how old are the ones Trump goes after for wives generally? What's a few years either way when youre a couple decades older than someone, right?

Are you implying that it's an easy jump for a 40 year old man to rape a 13 year old girl because he was with a 23 year old woman once?

[mainiac]

For your consideration.

That article was such a load of crap.  Most of the problems it documents aren't problems of American politics, they are problems of Republican politics.  The democrats didn't have those problems... because the democrats practiced democracy while the republicans allowed for the tyranny of the plurality.

But people will bend over backwards to insist both sides are the same.  Bernie Sanders a political sociopath?  Come on.  You can argue he got red mist in his eyes but he was always advocating for things that the democratic party wants advocacy for.  Ted Cruz routinely embarrassed his party at the tactical level.  There's no comparison.