Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/13/dark-arts-me-too.html
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We’ve been seeing the last gasp of a dying culture/party. They will go down kicking and screaming into irrelevance, and obscurity. Sure it’s just a blip, and it will probably be a nasty, dirty, and violent blip, but a blip is all it is. They have nothing but bigotry, hatred and fear as their foundation and that will crumble. The silver lining in all this is that it will help weed out many of the flaws in America - racism, inequality, misogyny etc. and hopefully help us, as a nation, move beyond that.
Plus, we should be thankful at how incompetent these bozos really are.
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And O’Keefe settles another lawsuit for less than he receives in donations.
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Who would have thought sloppy false accusations would quickly be revealed as such?
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The risk of the extinction burst is that sometimes it works.
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The good news is that journalists are getting better at detecting these forgeries.
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James O’Keefe, you scamp. I really would love to give you a hug kick you in the balls.
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Smells like O’Keefe, tastes like Bannon.
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Nice to see that the party of Stupid Watergate has now added Idiotic Ratfucking to the menu.
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I worry that this effect of this stunt isn’t to discredit Chuck Schumer. Instead, the point might be to discredit people who come forward with allegations. It there are high profile cases of definitely false allegations made for political reasons, then the claim that an allegation is false and being made for political reasons gains strength.
I hope what everyone is learning from this and the recent O’Keefe stunt that it’s actually not at all easy to make false claims of sexual assault against someone. The idea that it is easy to do so and we need to be hyper-vigilant about it is nonsense.
Real claims are often dismissed as false. That means the test we use for detecting valid sexual assault claims has a high false negative rate. Tests with a high false negative rate often have a low false positive rate.
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Combine this with the general discrediting of news with everything not liked called “fake news”. And the stage is set that everything not directly from them isn’t credible no matter what.
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Well, they did get Trump elected…
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“Someone”
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The thing is any reasonable vetting by a news source can reveal a phony lawsuit doc, especially a complaint.
Lawsuits have easily verifiable public records such as index numbers and names of the plaintiff’s counsel. Plus Federal suits are E-filed. Pretty much anyone in the research department of a news agency can bring them up online.
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What happens when ham-fisted con artists take the empty, spittle-flecked shouts of “Fake News” to heart and don’t realize how professional journalists work.
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I truly hope there’s not a market for used underwear fitting that description. Oh wait. Breitbart.
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I think the core of the matter is that they don’t realize that professional journalists work, in the first place.
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Doesn’t matter if it’s fake. Over the next few weeks, right wing media will start talking about how he was accused, and why don’t the Democrats demand that he step down?
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Cernovich and Johnson yesterday: “lol we’re gonna pwn Schumer”
Cernovich and Johnson today, after realizing that forging documents is a felony with a 10 year, $25,000 fine: “We’re offering $10,000 for information about who sent us the fake documents we created.”
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I really agree. The larger goal is to undermine feminism by highlighting the contradictions in our approach to abuse accusations. For a long time the approach has been “assume that every accusation is true”, because:
a) A survivor has little to gain and much to lose by coming forward, so they have no motivation to lie.
b) A false positive is better than a false negative - i.e. the consequences of failing to respond to a true accusation are more severe than the consequences of overreacting to a false one.
The misogynistic far-right is trying to highlight situations where these justifications are at their weakest. That way, even if the specific situations are explained away, people start to have a general sense that
c) Some people get rewarded with money and/or political influence by claiming to be survivors, so they are motivated to lie.
d) In some cases, the effect of a false positive could have huge consequences on a broader social, economic, and political level.
While both © and (d) are technically true, they are irrelevant for almost all discussions of abuse accusations. Feminists don’t ignore them because we believe they are impossible, but because they are distractions from (a) and (b), which are still and have always been the most effective guideposts for doing the right thing in almost every abuse accusation.
By constructing high-profile situations where © and (d) are very prominent elements, the far-right will be able to shift the common sense around abuse accusations even if every situation they construct is exposed as a fraud. It’s a win-win, I’m not sure how to counter it 
