"Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision."
How could it be recklessness? Everyone — "we all" — adopted a stock phrase to protect their own political interests and to avoid responsibility for depriving the country of a legitimate primary process and to foist her on us.
I guess it means something that she's calling herself and her confederates reckless. It is bad to be reckless, so she's admitting fault. It's just not believable that the fault was in carelessly disregarding the risks. It was coldly deliberate, and it would have been brilliant, I'm sure they all thought, if it had worked, and she'd won.
"After more than 18 years, Mangum made this admission during a podcast interview. She is currently serving a prison sentence for an unrelated murder charge, and due to the statute of limitations, she cannot be charged with perjury for the false accusations. This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs."
She's in prison for murder now, and she's waited until the statute of limitations has run on the perjury she now says she committed.
The charges against the lacrosse players were dropped long ago, and each of them won $20 million for the persecution they suffered. The confessing looks like this, in case you want to form an opinion about why she's doing this now:
More than 18 years after the Duke lacrosse allegations, Crystal Mangum admits that she made it all up. pic.twitter.com/TPQ3jc8oEv
"... and asked [my granddaughter] to supply the saliva. The good news is, it turns out she is indeed my granddaughter, although unlike all the other grandkids, she looks nothing like any of the families on my side. She looks like a clone of her mother and a lot like her half brother from a different father. The results of this test leaked out via another family member, and there was a lot of anger by the mother that I doubted her faithfulness. I did apologize, although I really wanted to know the results. My apology was not accepted as good enough...."
That goes into The Annals of Unaccepted Apologies.
I wonder:
1. How often does it happen that someone secretly acquires a DNA sample from another person and gets it tested? It's always wrong, so there would not usually be confessions.
2. What tempted the grandmother to give in, not only to her unseemly curiosity, but to telling someone else what she did? Did she not realize how wrong she was? Did this other person participate in gossip about the child's paternity, motivating the grandmother to whip out her proof?
3. How often has it happened, across the great span of human existence, that family members have gazed upon the face of an innocent child and formed ideas about who, really, is the father? What evils, great and small, have they committed in the name of their suspicions?
"I don’t have — I think I have a duty to talk to people. I have a duty to explain what happened. And I think I have a duty to do everything I can to try and do what’s right. If there is anything I can do to try and help customers out here. And I don’t see what good is accomplished by me just sitting locked in a room pretending the outside world doesn’t exist."
He says he's not focusing on his own liability: "There’s going to be a time and a place for me to think about myself and my own future. But I don’t think this is it. Right now, look, I've had a bad month. This has not been a fun month for me. But that’s not what matters here...."
He takes risks. And he doesn't focus on the future.
She... confronted Hardy, who said he left a “bug” in her room that he had since thrown into a pond, police said. Allegedly, Hardy later put his confession in writing in a social media message the woman ultimately provided to investigators....
The woman used Google to determine the device [she found under her bed] was actually a voice-activated recorder like the one Hardy is alleged to have claimed to have thrown in a pond....
Police alleged that officers heard Hardy’s “very distinguishable voice”....
He won "American Idol" with that voice, and now that voice — along with his confession — identifies him to the police.
"... an apparent reference to the Employment Development Department.
The rappers brag in the video about their 'swagger for E.D.D.' while holding stacks of E.D.D. envelopes, and about getting rich by going 'to the bank with a stack of these.' A disclaimer below the video says that it was made with props 'for entertainment purposes.' It is not clear when the disclaimer was added."
Said Joaquin Phoenix, accepting the Oscar last night for his performance as a clown-faced murderer. As you can see in that short quote, he's expressing effusive empathy for his fellow creatures, but I wouldn't see his movie, because I believe there is something soul-damaging — something erosive of empathy — in watching the graphic depiction of murder. I don't know why Phoenix considered "Joker" a good place to put his talent, then lectures us about our insufficient love for the living things of earth. And I'm writing that as I drink my coffee with milk.
Here's the full transcript, worth seeing in text, because the actorly performance of the text makes it harder to understand the rationality of it. It feels like an emotional cascade. You get caught up wondering how does he feel and does he really feel what he is expressing and what is he really saying and is he coherent and is coherence necessary?
I’m full of so much gratitude now. I do not feel elevated above any of my fellow nominees or anyone in this room, because we share the same love...
This speech will also end with "love" — "Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow" — and we just saw a montage of the nominated actors that ended with Pope Francis (Jonathan Pryce) saying "Remember, truth may be vital, but without love, it is also unbearable." But the love in question at this point was:
... the love of film. And this form of expression has given me the most extraordinary life. I don’t know where I’d be without it. But I think the greatest gift that it’s given me, and many people in [this industry] is the opportunity to use our voice for the voiceless.
Oh, no! It's going to be a political speech. The Oscars got off to a bad start with Brad Pitt — who won the best supporting actor Oscar — saying he only had 45 seconds to speak, "which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week" and maybe Quentin Tarantino could do a movie about the impeachment where "in the end the adults do the right thing." Tarantino has been doing movies based on historical events where the good guys win in the end, and the movie Pitt won his Oscar for is one of those movies, so his line was well-crafted, but I hated seeing one political side given precedence. The show was just starting, and he was telling half the country their perspective on the world is not valued. Ah, maybe not. His remarks are focused on the desire for witness testimony in the Senate, not the quest to be rid of the President. That puts him in the Susan Collins position, which isn't all that divisive. But it rubbed me the wrong way. Me — and I'm not a Trump voter — I'm just someone offended by the 3 years of disrespect shown to the people whose candidate won an election.
But Phoenix didn't go into partisan politics. In fact, he is trying to pull people together:
I’ve been thinking about some of the distressing issues that we’ve been facing collectively. I think at times we feel or are made to feel that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality.
That's the opposite of divisive.
I think, whether we’re talking about gender inequality or racism or queer rights or indigenous rights or animal rights, we’re talking about the fight against injustice. We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, one species, has the right to dominate, use and control another with impunity. I think we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world. Many of us are guilty of an egocentric world view, and we believe that we’re the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakeable. Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.
We're called back to nature, away from the disconnection. If we put milk in our coffee, there is — somewhere out there — a cow that was used. Phoenix doesn't go from there into a PETA lecture. He gets back to human life:
We fear the idea of personal change, because we think we need to sacrifice something; to give something up. But human beings at our best are so creative and inventive, and we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and the environment.
That's almost right wing. It's at least inclusive of the right. The environment matters, but we can go for innovation and technology and find solutions. It's not about giving things up. Then comes another right-wing-friendly idea, personal responsibility:
I have been a scoundrel all my life, I’ve been selfish.
This reminds me of Trump, last Thursday, going on about his impeachment acquittal: "We went through hell, unfairly, did nothing wrong, did nothing wrong, I've done things wrong in my life, I will admit, not purposely, but I've done things wrong." Oh, Trump couldn't confess "I have been a scoundrel all my life," but he did confess "I've done things wrong in my life."
I’ve been cruel at times, hard to work with, and I’m grateful that so many of you in this room have given me a second chance. I think that’s when we’re at our best: when we support each other. Not when we canceleach other out for our past mistakes...
A clear statement against the cancel culture.
... but when we help each other to grow. When we educate each other; when we guide each other to redemption. When he was 17, my brother wrote this lyric. He said: "Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow."
The brother, River Phoenix, died in 1993, when he was 23. He wasn't rescued or educated or guided. Joaquin Phoenix was 19 when he lost his brother, and now he resurrects that brother's spirit in a simple call for love.
Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor.
"He would turn on music to prevent guests from hearing any noise she made. And one time, when Mr. Patterson believed she had tried to escape, Jayme said he struck her and threatened worse consequences if she tried again. But last Thursday, after Mr. Patterson told Jayme he was leaving for a few hours, she managed to force her way out from under the bed, she said. She grabbed a pair of men’s shoes — apparently Mr. Patterson’s — and ran to a nearby road, shoes ill fitting and on the wrong feet, crying out for help.... Mr. Patterson, who had apparently been out looking for Jayme, told the deputies he knew why they had stopped him, investigators said. 'I did it,' he said."
"... but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist. More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the 'loss' of my own 'entitlement' as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women."
All toxic forms hurt. This is from a NYT op-ed by philosophy professor, George Yancy. A philosophy professor should not write such a blatant tautology. If he's not willing to say all forms of masculinity hurt and violate women, he shouldn't say "all forms." All he's saying is toxin is toxic.
Does Yancy define the part of masculinity that is toxic? He gives an example: He wanted the woman he married to take on his last name:
While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence. I had inherited a subtle, yet still violent, form of toxic masculinity.
Also toxic: The feeling that he "should be thanked when I clean the house, cook, sacrifice my time."
These are deep and troubling expectations that are shaped by male privilege, male power and toxic masculinity.
He sounds a little zombie-ized, doesn't he? Why can't everybody who lives in a house thank anybody who puts work into cleaning it? And doesn't everyone who cooks a meal expect those who eat it to say thanks? What's "deep and troubling"?
If you are a woman reading this, I have failed you.
Well, get your ass over here, Yancy, and cook me dinner. I didn't know this was going to be so personal.
Through my silence and an uninterrogated collective misogyny, I have failed you. I have helped and continue to help perpetuate sexism. I know about how we hold onto forms of power that dehumanize you only to elevate our sense of masculinity. I recognize my silence as an act of violence. For this, I sincerely apologize.
Now, I think you're making fun of me. Oh, but wait... there's more! I see it ahead....
I speak as an insider. I know about what so many of us men think about women — the language we use, the sense of power that we garner through our sexual exploits, our catcalling and threatening, our sexually objectifying gazes, our dehumanizing and despicable sexual gestures and our pornographic imaginations.
Garner!
There's much more to this essay, but I stop at "garner." It's just a special privilege of mine. Althouse privilege.
I'll just say, overall, Yancy has the tone of bowing down and confessing to God and pleading for absolution. But women are not God. We're human beings too. Wake me up when you get there. And make me some coffee.
We want to hear from men about their high school experiences. A Times editor may contact you with follow-up questions. No information you provide will be published without your permission.
But Christine Blasely Ford didn't want her name to come out, and yet it did. Is the Times more trustworthy than Dianne Feinstein?
Given the stakes these days and the low standard of what counts as sexual abuse — like Cory Booker's reaching for a breast a second time — why would anyone volunteer anything? I understand the value of having an open and honest conversation about these things, but hasn't that route been closed off by the shocking dire consequences to Brett Kavanaugh (and Al Franken and Louis CK, etc.)?
But the NYT has a form it would like you to fill out. The first question is:
Did you ever, as a teenager or younger man, behave toward women in ways you may now regret? If so, how? And how has that experience stayed with you over the years?
Won't this drag in a thousand "Cat Person" and Cory Booker stories? If you've got anything in the Kavanaugh-as-told-by-Blasey category, you'd have to be irrational to put it in writing. Or maybe just old or dying and not looking for another step of professional or social advancement.
A book "Open to the Public" on a table in a café in Madison, Wisconsin. Many different people have written on the pages, many talking about lost love or loneliness...
"In practice, it must be said, her method seems to demand heroic levels of forbearance on the part of faithful spouses. They are asked not only to forgo the presumption of their own moral superiority but to consider and empathize with what has been meaningful, liberating, or joyous about their partners’ adulterous experiences. The affair that has caused them so much anguish may have been prompted by boredom or a longing for sexual variety, or it may have been a bid for existential 'growth, exploration, and transformation.'... They are also asked to control their vengeful impulses, learning to 'metabolize' their desire for vengeance 'in a healthy manner.'... They must resist the desire to 'know everything' and avoid demanding details about the physical acts involved in their partners’ betrayals. (They can ask 'investigative questions' about feelings but not 'detective questions' about hair color, sexual positions, or the size of genital organs.) Americans, Perel observes, are particularly inclined to believe that a process of forensic confession is a necessary forerunner to the restoration of trust, but 'coming clean,' she argues, is often more destructive than it is salutary, and 'honesty requires careful calibration.'"
"I moved on her and I failed. I'll admit it. I did try and fuck her. She was married. I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn't get there. And she was married... Then all of a sudden I see her, she's now got the big phony tits and everything. She's totally changed her look.... Whoa! I've gotta use some tic tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course - not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended.
If anyone was offended. Is there any chance that no one was offended?!
Hillary Clinton immediately tweeted: "This is horrific. We cannot allow this man to become president." And Tim Kaine said:
"I don't like to say the words that he's used in the past when he calls women, 'pigs, dogs and slobs' ... but this is behavior that's just outrageous and so that there would be a news story that would have more statements like this of this kind, I mean, gosh, I'm sad to say that I'm not surprised. I should be surprised and shocked. I'm sad to say that I'm not."
Yes, Tim Kaine is right. Trump's statement — which is itself only words — is a confession to behavior.
The shocking ruling, in a case made famous in the Netflix series "Making A Murderer," could result in Dassey getting a new trial or being freed from prison. It gives prosecutors 90 days to decide whether to retry Dassey, although an appeal could extend the proceedings....
"These repeated false promises, when considered in conjunction with all relevant factors, most especially Dassey’s age, intellectual deficits, and the absence of a supportive adult, rendered Dassey’s confession involuntary under the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments," [wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge William Duffin].
Much more at the link, which goes to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Writes Emory philosophy professor George Yancy, purporting to free himself from "the lies that we men like to tell ourselves — that we are beyond the messiness of sexism and male patriarchy, that we don’t oppress women."
This doesn’t mean that I intentionally hate women or that I desire to oppress them. It means that despite my best intentions, I perpetuate sexism every day of my life.... As a sexist, I have failed women. I have failed to speak out when I should have. I have failed to engage critically and extensively their pain and suffering in my writing. I have failed to transcend the rigidity of gender roles in my own life. I have failed to challenge those poisonous assumptions that women are “inferior” to men or to speak out loudly in the company of male philosophers who believe that feminist philosophy is just a nonphilosophical fad. I have been complicit with, and have allowed myself to be seduced by, a country that makes billions of dollars from sexually objectifying women, from pornography, commercials, video games, to Hollywood movies. I am not innocent.
I have been fed a poisonous diet of images that fragment women into mere body parts. I have also been complicit with a dominant male narrative that says that women enjoy being treated like sexual toys. In our collective male imagination, women are “things” to be used for our visual and physical titillation. And even as I know how poisonous and false these sexist assumptions are, I am often ambushed by my own hidden sexism. I continue to see women through the male gaze that belies my best intentions not to sexually objectify them. Our collective male erotic feelings and fantasies are complicit in the degradation of women. And we must be mindful that not all women endure sexual degradation in the same way.
I skimmed this when it came out, on Christmas Eve and have had half a mind to write about it since then. My original idea of what I wanted to say has faded, mainly because I'm reading these 2 paragraphs more closely and realize that he's not admitting to much, in fact, he's promoting himself as a man who understands feminist critique and is aspiring to win admiration for trying to rid himself of aspects of sexism that most men (I think) are not willing to regard as sexism.
I mean, look at these failings. Not transcending the rigidity of gender roles in his own life? (A humblebrag? He's so inherently masculine.) Insufficient loudness in contradiction of male philosophers who diminish feminist philosophy? Acceptance of Hollywood movies? Lack of mindfulness? Lax inclusion in something called the collective male imagination? The real point here is that all men are necessarily embedded in sexism, an affirmative effort is needed to escape from it, he's so enlightened he knows that, and he's so good that he's striving and straining to escape.
On first read, however, I thought the confession of sexism was more damning, and I was going to blog about how a professor is admitting that he subjects his students to different conditions based on their sex, and that is, as a legal matter, sex discrimination. The line "I continue to see women through the male gaze that belies my best intentions not to sexually objectify them" is, actually, rather damning.
On the theory that the confession was damning, I wanted to ask: Why did Yancy feel free to write that? And I wanted to answer: If you go to the link, you'll see that the column is not about sexism. It's about racism. It's called "Dear White America." Yancy is a black man, and he'd like the collective entity called White America to recognize that we are necessarily embedded in racism, and his detailing of his own sexism is presented as a model of how to examine yourself and find the problem in you even though you resist and like to think of yourself as not belonging to the benighted crowd known as racists. So Yancy feels free to write that he's a sexist because it's part of an essay about the racism of white people.
But I felt he was endangering himself, even as he lured others into endangering themselves. Come on, watch me confess. It's good. It's just what we need. But how does he know that? What confidence can we have that this soul-baring exercise will work out well? He is perhaps overconfident, because he enjoys certain privilege as he speaks about race, but he could be wrong about how his confession will be received. Once the words are said, you lose control, and other people, with other agendas, will use those words against you. Ironically, his confidence is patriarchal. He seems to think women will appreciate his efforts and enfold him. Shouldn't part of the confession have been that he assumes women are nice and nurturing and incapable of fighting too hard?
Having done my second read, I have to say, you can follow his model of confessing to racism, but work on your skills. Put your confession in carefully honed writing, and ensure that it works to make you look better than virtually everyone else — the overt racists and the blind, benighted white people who won't admit to being racists. Think you can do that?
Said Adam Sirois, the lone holdout after 18 days of deliberation in the Etan Patz murder case. "There was no real firm, corroborating evidence" for the confession by the defendant Pedro Hernandez," he said, quoted in a decently detailed NYT article.
There were originally 3 jurors who wanted to acquit, but in the end, it was down to Sirois. The other jurors were, we're told, put great weight on something that doesn't seem to have much value as corroboration:
On [the final day of deliberation] the jurors found themselves focusing again on what many had considered one of the most damning bits of evidence against Mr. Hernandez: that he had provided physical details of a passageway on Thompson Street where he said he had dumped Etan’s body....
There was a videotape of Hernandez leading the police down that passageway:
For some jurors, the tape was proof Mr. Hernandez was telling the truth. “The cops can’t implant that in his head,” Joan M. Brooks said. “Pedro was leading the walk.”
But Etan's body was never found. Hernandez just seemed to know about a particular alleyway.
Defense lawyers argued that the confession, which he repeated later to a prosecutor, was a fiction made up under police pressure by a man with a low I.Q. and a personality disorder clouding his ability to tell fact from fantasy...
Mr. Sirois acknowledged he was more skeptical than other jurors of the police handling of the interview that led to the confession, noting most of it was not recorded and that the police misrepresented some of Mr. Hernandez’s actual words in their written account of his statement. He also found compelling the expert testimony that Mr. Hernandez was susceptible to making a false confession.
The NYT has a second article "The Legacy of Etan Patz: Wary Children Who Became Watchful Parents." That connects the old Patz-related parental wariness to the present-day rebels of the "free-range children" movement. In fact, yesterday happened to be "Take Our Children to the Park ... and Let Them Walk Home by Themselves" Day.
ADDED: Why are there photographs of the jurors? In the comments, someone says that the holdout juror "looks like a smug little prick & probably glad that he let the guy off." This is a man who held out for 18 days of deliberation. How do you expect a man who just did that to look?
Adam Sirois, juror No 11, said Hernandez's guilt had not been proven beyond reasonable doubt. During a press conference held at the conclusion of the trial, a smirking Sirois sheepishly raised his hand to indicate that he was the juror who was responsible for the mistrial.
Sirois told reporters Pedro Hernadenz's apparent mental health issues were a major concern for him, and that he could not convict the defendant solely based on his 'very bizarre' confession, reported ABC News.
So there are photographs because the jurors gave a press conference. The photographers must have taken thousands of pictures of Sirois's face, and the newspaper editors have chosen one, one that supports the "smirking... sheepishly" characterization. If he "looks like a smug little prick" to you, that's because the editors decided to help you think that and because the man just had an 18-day experience and was the kind of person who could stand up for his beliefs in a group setting for more than 2 weeks. Most people would cave and go along to get along. These people are much more likely to have a pleasant, unremarkable face.
ALSO: It should be clear that the jurors chose to give that press conference. They knew they didn't have to do it. And yet, if they had not taken advantage of the opportunity to engage with the press as a group, the press would have sought them out individually.
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