Thread by @VekTorBK

And as soon as Brett Kavanaugh claims that he's never lied, you'll have something of interest.

The average person will own up to telling an average of 23 lies over any given two-week period. The real number is likely higher.

Because people lie. All of them. And they lie a lot.

https://twitter.com/Calvanij/status/1044612836280979456

Supporting article for that number:
psychologytoday.com/us/blog/homo-c…

The idea that a young man in the 1980's would lie about how much (or little, especially) sexual experience he had, when other men were cruel in their abuse of male virgins, is one of the least controversial notions in existence.

Does that impact his "credibility" now?

No.

If you didn't live through the early 1980's as a young man, you really don't have the perspective to understand how bad this was.

It was a nightmare.

For some, lying about their status as a virgin was necessary as a survival tactic.

Literally. And I know what that word means.

This was a time, in large areas of the country, where homophobia was virulent.

Not like today's accusations against anyone who doesn't enthusiastically endorse the lifestyle strongly enough. The term has lost almost all meaning today, through gross misapplication far too often.

Back then, it was written right on the tin: fear of homosexuality. People were regularly beaten, sometimes within an inch of their lives, merely because someone *suspected* that they were gay.

I was one of them.

AIDS was just starting to ramp up in public perception back then.

People were afraid. This was a new plague, and one that the scientists didn't understand at all. And in the early 80's, we were told that catching AIDS was basically a death sentence.

Frightened, ignorant people act more irrationally that normal, and they'll lash out in fear.

If you were frail, had a higher-pitched voice, or didn't display all of the expected traits of virile heterosexual men... it was an inquisition. It didn't matter if you weren't gay. You looked like you might be, and that was close enough.

The truth just didn't matter to them.

If you were actually a virgin, too... God help you.

They suspected that this was simply a cover story. How could they KNOW you weren't gay, if no one could testify to the fact that you really *did* like girls?

If they weren't sure, they'd err on the side of "caution".

Add into that the notion that you'd never dream of trying to force yourself on a woman... and unless someone found you attractive enough (while you're wrestling with all the hormonal changes going on then, likely giving you zits), you were pretty much in a Kafkaesque nightmare.

It's understandable, then, that some would take up whatever camouflage they could to distract from the idea that they were someone who should have the living shit beaten out of them.

So they'd lie.

Because they had a reasonable fear that they might really die in those attacks.

So please forgive me if I discount your 20/20 hindsight about how damaging it is to a man's credibility today that he might have lied about sex he hadn't had as a young man in the early 80's.

Because "preserving your credibility" doesn't trump your ability to survive that scene.

If you weren't on the receiving end of that kind of cultural insanity, you don't know what it's like.

And you have no standing to judge those who did what they needed to do in order to survive it, through the prism and standard of what you believe now, today.

Stop it.

Please.

You might not understand, or even be able to imagine what those who are different than you had to go through in their early lives.

But you can demonstrate the simple human traits of compassion and empathy, even towards those who are from a "different tribe" than you belong to.

There was a time when those values were taught as a universal good.

Our society has lost too much of that along the long, slow slide we've taken as a society, into the abyss of ever-escalating tribalism and demonization of The Other.

We've forgotten that people are individuals.

I believe this is the inevitable outcome of the embrace of "identity politics", where people are carved up into groups and then these groups set against one another, in a Battle Royale for power and status.

It's the war of All against All... but with mandatory team memberships.

It is the formalization, legitimization and weaponization of one of the most base of human habits in the history of our existence: bigotry.

Bigotry is the antithesis of treating each person as what they rightly are: an individual, who deserves to be treated and judged as such.

Bigotry reduces all of an individual's distinctiveness, experience and choices down to a crude caricature that exists in a bigot's mind... it reduces people down to "things", which fit into the convenient box that they've created in their mind, for those of "their kind".

#Evil

When this is done based on largely immutable characteristics, like the particular race/gender combination that has been chosen to serve as The Designated Hate Object... you tend to get some of the greatest evils in the history of the world as a result.

And we're doing it again.

If you had a deliberate goal of destroying as much human life as possible, you could hardly choose a better underpinning philosophy than making identity politics the most important idea that anyone can be indoctrinated with.

It is a philosophy of power, via revenge for the past.

It takes pernicious notion of "collective guilt", and applies weaponized bigotry to it, declaring that, simply by belonging to a particular group that you never chose, you are responsible for all the evils ever committed by members of that group.

And you need to pay for it.

If this idea is not countered, I believe it will end with the destruction of everyone.

We need to remember what binds us together (our humanity), instead of concentrating on ways to divide us into different categories, and taking out your rage about the past on category members.

Exacting revenge for evils of the past, on people who never committed those evils themselves but who share some attribute with them, is the polar opposite of justice.

It doesn't make the world less evil. It just shuffles the labels around.

We must find a way to stop this.

If you're going to hate someone the very least you could do is hate them for who they actually are as an individual, instead of the fact that they belong to some artificial category that you've classified as Bad.

Hating people by category is just lazy.

Be better than that.
/end