Seriously? I must have had it wrong all this time. I thought a womanizer is a
man who misrepresents himself to a woman to take advantage of her financially.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2017 2:54 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Al Franken and the Selective Force of #MeToo
Carl, I am curious about something. On several occasions you have referred to
yourself as a former womanizer and I am not sure what you mean by that. My
understanding of the word is that a womanizer is a man who misrepresents
himself or otherwise lies or tricks a woman in order to get her consent to sex
and once he accomplishes that goal he drops her and goes on to his next victim.
Is that what you mean or do you mean something else? Somehow, if that is what
you do mean, that does not fit the image of your personality that I have formed.
On 12/11/2017 10:32 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Thanks for the kind words, Frank. I notice that in my great haste to
burn a witch or two of my own, I saddled Arkansas with Judge Roy,
rather than Alabama. Shades of Bill Clinton!
But that slip caused me to remember that every state in this Land of
the Free(whites) has plenty of men, prominent and obscure, who violate
women and women's rights with impunity. Just like Judge Roy, or like
Donald(women love to have me grab their P-----)Trump.
Back in the days when Ralph Munro was the secretary of state, here in
Washington State, my wife and I were seated at the head table in a
convention which featured Ralph as Keynote Speaker. My job?
Introduce Ralph...as if he needed that! So here I sat, next to the
podium. Beside me was my very attractive wife. Next to her, dressed
in kilts, sat Ralph Munro, a man who had done so much for all disabled
citizens of our state. And I, a blind man standing before a room of
well over 250 blind persons, and their sighted families and friends,
had the great honor of introducing him, amid wild applause.
Ralph Munro charmed us and flattered us as only he could do. And then
he took his leave, headed for another gathering with the CEO of the
Ford Motor Company.
As we were finally done and done with the banquet festivities, and
headed back to our hotel room, Cathy said in a quiet voice, "Do you
know what Ralph was doing while you were introducing him?"
"Not a clue, but I hope he wasn't picking his nose", I replied, still
in a festive mood.
"Maybe you'll wish that's what he was doing. All the time you were
raving about this super human being, he was rubbing his leg up and
down the length of my leg. And I either had to take it or jump up and
yell at him to cut it out...which I almost did."
After all these years I still have many good memories about the great
support Ralph Munro gave to we, the disabled, but I know for sure that
I'd never seat him next to any of the women in my life...not to be
taken as having "had" lots of women in my sheltered but lustful life.
I mean my daughters, grand daughters, wife and sisters. Well, with
both sisters over 80 years of age, I doubt too many womanizers would
bother them...unless they were handy.
But I am wandering, and my coffee is getting cold.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/10/17, Frank Ventura <frank.ventura@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl, in the decades of reading posts on the internet and many years
prior to that reading posts on dial-up bulletin boards I have never
read a better post. Your message should be font page of every
newspaper; but we know who controls that now we don't we.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl ;
Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, December 10, 2017 11:55 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Al Franken and the Selective Force of
#MeToo
The battle cry of indignant People, everywhere should be, "Remember
the Salem Witch Hunt!"
Witch hunts have rules of their own. We all pay lip service to,
"Innocent until proven guilty". But under Witch Hunt rules we see
the accused as Guilty whether proven innocent or not.
Witch hunts depend upon Mass Hysteria. Remember Senator Joe McCarthy
and his "Red Scare"? More recently we have the example of our Nation
being threatened by wicked Whistle Blowers. And the double danger of
the Muslims sneaking into our Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
And now we are in the Day of the "Maybe Sexual misconductors." These
Male Devils, mostly men in high public visibility, such as in
entertainment, and Democrats, are being found out in order to make
America safer for our womenfolk.
It's a pretty good guess that this witch hunt will not improve
anyone's life, except probably a few lawyers. Show us where the Red
Scare, the Whistle Blower Scare, and the Muslim Terrorist Scare have
made any improvement in Life in the USA?
As with all witch hunts, we are being scammed. If you doubt it, just
take a look in the Locker Room at who is fanning the flames around
the stakes holding those evil offenders. At the head of the class is
that man who believes he is so irresistible that gorgeous women are
lining up to have him fondle their B----s and grab their P----s(Some
letters deleted in case children are reading this ramble). No wonder
that Great Man is backing a Senator Wannabee in Arkansas. What's the
old saying? "Birds of a feather
F--- together".
And shame of all shames, women...yes, American Women will line up at
the poles and vote for these Macho Men. And down the road they will
wonder why nothing has changed. They and their daughters and their
grand daughters and beyond will have no changes in their lives
because of the few brave women who "outed" those men who touched them
without permission, or shoved their dirty tongues into their mouths.
So as nasty as that sounds, why in God's Green Earth do they turn
around and support men who would do exactly the same thing, if given half a
chance?
Carl Jarvis
On 12/9/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Senator Al Franken. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
Al Franken and the Selective Force of #MeToo By Masha Gessen, The
New Yorker
08 December 17
On what he called the worst day of his political life, Senator Al
Franken articulated two points that are central to understanding
what has become known as the #MeToo moment. In an eleven-minute
speech, in which Franken announced his intention to resign from the
Senate, he made this much clear:
the force that is ending his political career is greater than the
truth, and this force operates on only roughly half of this
country's population-those who voted for Hillary Clinton and who
consume what we still refer to as mainstream media.
There was one notable absence in his speech: Franken did not
apologize. In fact, he made it clear that he disagreed with his
accusers. "Some of the allegations against me are simply not true,"
he said. "Others I remember very differently." Earlier, Franken had
in fact apologized to his accusers, and he didn't take his apologies
back now, but he made it plain that they had been issued in the
hopes of facilitating a conversation and an investigation that would clear
him.
He had, it seems, been attempting to buy calm time to work while a
Senate ethics committee looked into the accusations. But, by
Thursday morning, thirty-two Democratic senators had called on
Franken to resign. The force of the #MeToo moment leaves no room for
due process, or, indeed, for Franken's own constituents to consider their
choice.
Still, the force works selectively. "I, of all people, am aware that
there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who
has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the
Oval Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls
campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party," said
Franken, referring to Donald Trump and the Alabama Senate candidate Roy
Moore.
Trump and Moore are immune because the blunt irresistible force
works only on the other half of the country.
That half is cleaning its ranks in the face of-and in clear reaction
to-genuine moral depravity on the other side. The Trump era is one
of deep and open immorality in politics. Moore is merely one example.
Consider Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican who won his
congressional race earlier this year after not only being captured
on tape shoving a newspaper reporter but then also lying to police
about it. Consider the tax bill, which is stitched together from
shameless greed and boldface lies. Consider the series of racist travel
bans.
Consider the withdrawal from a series of international agreements
aimed at bettering the future of humanity, from migration to climate
change to cultural preservation. These are men who proclaim their
allegiance to the Christian faith while acting in openly hateful,
duplicitous, and plainly murderous ways. In response to this
unbearable spectacle, the roughly half of Americans who are actually
deeply invested in thinking of themselves as good people are trying
to claim a moral high ground. The urge to do so by policing sex is
not surprising. As Susan Sontag pointed out more than half a century
ago, Christianity has "concentrated on sexual behavior as the root
of virtue" and, consequently, "everything pertaining to sex has been
a 'special case' in our culture."
The case of Franken makes it all that much more clear that this
conversation is, in fact, about sex, not about power, violence, or
illegal acts. The accusations against him, which involve groping and
forcible kissing, arguably fall into the emergent, undefined, and
most likely undefinable category of "sexual misconduct." Put more
simply, Franken stands accused of acting repeatedly like a jerk, and
he denies that he acted this way. The entire sequence of events,
from the initial accusations to Franken's resignation, is based on
the premise that Americans, as a society, or at least half of a
society, should be policing non-criminal behavior related to sex.
While this half (roughly) of American society is morally superior
and also just bigger than the other half (roughly), it is not the
half that holds power in either of the houses of Congress or in the
majority of the state houses, and not the half that is handing out
lifetime appointments to federal courts at record-setting speed. And
while the two halves of this divided country may disagree on the
limits of acceptable sexual behavior, they increasingly agree on the
underlying premise that sexual behavior must be policed. As I wrote
in an earlier column, drawing on the work of the pioneering feminist
scholar Gayle Rubin, we seem to be in a period of renegotiating
sexual norms. Rubin has warned that such renegotiations tend to
produce ever more restrictive regimes of closely regulating sexuality.
While policing such unpleasant behavior as groping or wet kisses
landed on an unwilling recipient may seem to fall outside the realm
of sexuality, it is precisely this behavior's relationship to sex
that makes it a "special case"-and lands us in the trap of policing
sexuality.
Outside the #MeToo bubble, the renegotiation of the sexual regime is
happening right now in the Supreme Court. On Tuesday, the Court
heard arguments in the case of a Colorado baker who refused to make
a cake for a same-sex wedding. Justice Anthony Kennedy surprised
many observers with his seeming sympathy for the baker's argument.
"Suppose he says: 'Look, I have nothing against gay people,' " said
Kennedy. "
'But I just don't think they should have a marriage because that's
contrary to my beliefs.' It's not their identity; it's what they're
doing." It was an oddly refracted expression of the understanding
that our behavior toward others may be based-perhaps ought to be
based-on the way they conduct themselves in areas related to sex.
There are many differences between the case of the senator who lost
his job and the same-sex couple who couldn't get a cake;
undoubtedly, there is a difference between acting like a jerk and
getting married (though the plaintiff in the cake case claims to
have been offended by the gay couple's intention to get married).
Oddly, though, these cases stem from a common root. If only
Franken's heartbreakingly articulate expression of his loss were
capable of focussing our attention on this root, and on the dangers of the
drive to police sex.
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