You’d think the fact that he’d have sex with a vulnerable woman who was barely legal (at least by the time the relationship became known), 35 years his junior and his own stepdaughter would be enough to make most people want to keep their distance from Woody Allen even if there was no reason to believe the other accusations against him.
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I want to be clear. I don’t think you’re a monster or anything of the sort. If all I knew of you was this thread, I might think you were apologizing for child abuse, but you’re a fairly regular commenter and I have a longer memory that tells me you’re a decent person coming from a well-intended place. But you’re so very wrong here in you’re approach to Dylan Farrow’s long standing allegations which she reaffirms as an adult. That’s what I’m pushing back against.
I don’t reply to outright trollies and abuse apologists. I reply to the people I think might be open to reconsidering their views, people in whom I have some sense of decency. You’re such a person.
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Some of the attempts at justification/marginalization in this thread, though…
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This photo:
Who holds an SO like that? She looks like a hostage, he looks like a menacing LEO perp walking his capture. Weinstein is laughing in the background.
Who holds anyone like that.
Edited to correct: Probably not Weinstein.
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I don’t think that’s Weinstein in the background… Looks like Jon Favareu to me.
But Allen is a total creep. I don’t get how anyone thinks he’s a genius… his movies are so bourgeois and boring, warmed over retreads of Annie Hall… We get it, he’s neurotic. Ugh.
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Wow, it looks like it might be Jon Favreau. I didn’t know he looked like that now.
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He’s behind the camera now more often than not, to be fair.
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I hear you, and I know why people feel that way.
“Innocent until proven guilty” is one of those principles that forms the obsidian at the bottom of our minecraft world. It applies to criminal prosecution. The bar for success is “beyond reasonable doubt”, not 100% certainty. Reasonable in this context is from the average person’s point of view.
You live in a first world environment where thousands of years of history and effort have combined to keep us as safe as possible from tyrannical forces, be they governments, kings, dukes, princesses, or our own neighbours.
You should be able to see how this system protects you from petty assaults. If you are wrongly accused, you can prosecute for defamation.
The resources o the state may be immense, but they are not very well deployed, and cannot be relied on to be efficient, fair or accurate. We as citizens must be constantly vigilant to this, and prevent the election of idiots to positions of power.
BB discusses so many ethnic persecutions and issues - those people, like the Rohingya, would give heaven and earth for the protections we have, and our stability. They are being murdered, displaced. Consider the Yemenis. Consider the ethnic Koreans in Japan.
Sure, attack the system. Woody Allen should long ago have suffered consequences for what we understand to be his obscene activities, judged by our standards, informed by a questionably accurate media.
But always understand that as things stand, there is no possibility that any objective read of our personal knowledge can be taken by any external mind. There is a barrier that only telepathy could resolve.
Perhaps I mean to say this: If someone is guilty, then the appropriate approbation should be pointed at them. But if they are innocent, and that is mis-directed, then the appropriate remedy must be available to them.
And from my experience of the nastiness of humans, especially in packs, I rather suspect the latter is applicable far too frequently.
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One issue is that we do not have a way to establish innocence or guilt with 100% certainty. Just because somebody cannot be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, it doesn’t mean that they were found to be innocent.
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I hear you. The problem is this:
Side A: If I believed Woody Allen had molested his daughter, I might not be able to enjoy his movies anymore. I might avoid working with him, and be shocked that others are willing to work with him. *
Side B: If I think that Dylan Farrow is wrong in her claims of being molested, while I might think it is a tragic and uncomfortable situation all around - depending on whether I think Ms. Farrow is lying or was manipulated, but there would be no reason to shun Allen.
Not taking a side is indistinguishable from taking Woody Allen’s side.
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Exactly! If it was written by someone whose reputation I knew or published by some organization I had previously tested for accuracy (which I have done for the newspapers of my local area, and they failed spectacularly) then this might help me determine if I had enough information to decide anything. But since I don’t have any of that, it’s no more than the beginnings of anecdotal evidence.
No; why would I want to? I’m not google, I only know stuff that’s interesting to me.
Who is concerned about it? I certainly am not. Prominent public figures can look out for themselves, I’m not their lawyer.
I am personally acquainted with a regular guy that was accused of child molestation - no, wait, I know four regular people who were accused falsely. Only one of them had to flee his state of residence to avoid a literal lynching. Two had their children taken away and terrorized by state agents. And all of them were completely exonerated by actual evidence. I testified in one case, as an “expert witness” (which is not actually a legal term in VA where I gave testimony). I also know of two cases where the accusations were proven true by evidence, but (thankfully?) those were acquaintances, not friends.
Nonsense. There’s no true/false dichotomy here that I must respect. I can wait for actual evidence or the proceeding of a court case. I don’t have to decide to believe either Woody Allen or Dylan Farrow, and so I won’t. I refuse to be on either “side” in this case because I have no trustworthy evidence available to me.
But if I’m ever forced to decide such issues based on nothing but dueling anecdotes and information devoid of context, I want to become the effective head of whatever Committee of Vigilance and Safety is going around forcing people to make such decisions. Because the best place to be in an angry mob is in the leadership, that’s where the gravy is.
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Correct, and hence OJ.
Should you ever find yourself accused of a crime you didn’t commit, what do you think you would like the rules to be?
Carpenter axes in a pitch black coal cellar?
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You used the word “hearsay”. That word has a specific meaning. Dylan Farrow has stated in writing that she was abused by Woody Allen. That’s not hearsay. If it was sworn testimony that would be as good as it gets.
Since this storm began roiling the standards that are being demanded of the accusers (i.e. women) are impossible – one accusation is not enough, every accusation must have further corroboration from other independent sources, opinions that an accused is guilty must not even be expressed until we have the finality of a court decision (presumably after the accused exhausts his appeals).
Further the accusers themselves must prove that they were 1) dressed appropriately when the incident occurred, 2) otherwise near virginal in their previous sex lives and certainly not promiscuous, and 3) no history at all of even the slightest of mental health issues.
Even if a woman is able to meet all of the foregoing conditions the questions still remain of whether she is in it for the money (which can be proved by the woman substantial seeking monetary damages, especially if she herself is poor), whether she is politically motivated (which can “proved” be the accuser having differing political opinions than the accused), or just seeking revenge for some other slight (which women are notorious for).
I know you haven’t personally expressed all of the above, but I have seen all of the above expressed on this board, most multiple times by multiple users. I think I can confidently say said users are male. When you add it all this up, there exists a refusal to indulge the complaints of a woman about her abuse without her being subjected to extraordinary,even impossible standards of proof.
Just step back and look at this situation. Please. No other crime is treated like this.
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Right. But if you decide to not take a side, you are, in effect, taking a side.
The problem with needing actual evidence to side with someone who says they are a victim, is that most child molesters don’t molest in public, and we can never really know what goes on behind closed doors, and so virtually every alleged perp gets the benefit of the doubt, which means every alleged victim gets the harm of the doubt .
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Did you extend George Zimmerman the same benefit of the doubt in the Trayvon Martin case? Do you believe judgment should have been reserved until the resolution of the court proceedings and the matter not discussed among ourselves as if the entire population were a sequestered jury? Given that Zimmerman was acquitted is the truth of the matter settled?
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Right. It means stuff I heard people say that I have no way to verify, according to three online dictionaries I just checked. This fits perfectly because readwrite already has a different meaning.
Nor will I. Thank you for recognizing that!
If you mean I’m supporting either Farrow or Allen, then I reject this premise. It is false.
But if you are channeling Geddy Lee - “if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice” then yes, I have chosen free will. I neither support nor attack any specific person in this particular dispute given the evidence available to me. I oppose child mistreatment - although I will note that I don’t have the same standards of mistreatment as others here, I physically disciplined my children when I thought it was appropriate.
No, it does not mean that. I reject that as well. I can extend equivalent courtesy to every party in a dispute; I have that capacity.
Nobody has been harmed by my failure to rush to judgment. I’m hardly an innocent, but here I am completely innocent. I’m not even badgering anyone.
I certainly did. And also to Trayvon Martin. I investigated the circumstances as best I could, I did not rush to judgment. And Martin wouldn’t be restored to life if I hadn’t done so, my patience harmed no one.
I believe I have the right to reserve my judgment at my own discretion.
Discuss all you want; I haven’t objected at all.
Legally, yes it is. But in my opinion, with the data I have managed to gather, I believe that Zimmerman was guilty and the court was wrong.
/*EDIT: Remember I do not have any contact with, or do any business with, any party to this dispute. I have no impact whatsoever on their incomes or reputations.
That’s not what hearsay means, or maybe it does in a popular corruption. Anyway:
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Read what I have to say and then figure out if that was the case. One of the disadvantages of arguing for something that the majority of people believe is true is that everyone you are arguing against already knows all your arguments.
This is my problem. As a fairly privileged person with a background in philosophy I’ve seen a lot of people try to reduce problems of justice to problems of epistemology. It’s a thing to do if you are the sort of person who can worry about justice as a big thinking issue but it doesn’t always work for the people who suffer from injustice. A student in a philosophy class might easily forget that we’re not telepathic as they go into more and more abstract theory, the vast majority of people have no chance of forgetting that.
There is no obsidian bottom to our justice system. It’s quicksand all the way down and we have to be vigilant. Figuring out what is just and what isn’t just is hard and ongoing work. There’s no mantra that saves us from that work.
If you talk about the massacre of Rohingya by the Myanmar army, that’s not something that presumption of innocence has any effect on. Would the dead take the government to court for violating their civil rights?
Germany adopted presumption of innocence partly in response to the horrors of the Nazi regime, but if being a Jew was a crime punishable by death, then what good would fair trials do? Would the state not have been able to prove they were Jewish?
Every fixed system can be gamed. You talk about the system protecting me from petty assaults, and yes, it does a great job at that for me. But anyone who has read the news recently knows that it does a damn bad job of protecting women from routine sexual assault. The fact that we side with the accused by default is why it does a bad job of that. A great concept that I have to believe at one time helped people rally around the idea of rule of law has been taken by people with power and repackaged as a tool of oppression. People specifically raise, “presumption of innocence” as a counterpoint to “believe the victims”. Those two things ought to be compatible, but they aren’t because presumption of innocence doesn’t presume that women aren’t liars, it presumes that men ought to get away with whatever they did.
And if you want to say that’s just doing presumption of innocence wrong, I’d like to point out that it has always been this way. There was never a presumption of innocence that didn’t help men sexually abuse women. (I’m not saying that in the good old days before presumption of innocence things were better, they weren’t. We can’t assume the presumption of innocence was an important causal factor in any amelioration in that.) Presumption of innocence oppresses marginalized people by preventing them from naming their oppressors.
Having a fixed rule as a bedrock for justice is the equivalent of having a fixed system as a bedrock for cyber security. When you fix the system, hackers figure out how to get around it. People are constantly trying to get around just outcomes because justice is against the immediate material interests of the most powerful people. Justice needs to be a living system that constantly evolves to face constantly evolving threats.
I think we need to evaluate how “presumption of innocence” serves people with power and fails to serve people without power. It’s a very dear principle to people who worry more about being falsely accused of assault than they do of being assaulted. It’s an even dearer principle to people who have to worry more about being rightfully accused of assault than they do of being assaulted.
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