Wednesday, June 26, 2019

POTUS: The 'P' Is For 'Pig'; But The "Not My Type" Defense Is Probably Valid

Overall, I'm surprisingly ok with his policies thus far.
But as a person, dude is, as a friend of mine likes to remind me, a swine.
However, the following does not seem to be true:
Sexual abuse is not, ultimately, about sexual attraction. It is about power. It is about one person’s exertion of will over another.
I mean, I'm not in the greatest position to speak on this, since I'm not a sexual abuser. But empirical evidence indicates that--as normal people uncorrupted by political correctness have never doubted--rape is about sex. (Basically, every empirical claim feminism ever convinced me of turned out to be false, incidentally...)
   Anyway, perhaps sexual harassment is different, but I doubt it; it's probably about sex.
   One consequence of this is that--contra the prevailing media conventional wisdom, the not my type defense is probably valid. In the loose, following sense: it isn't a weightless consideration.
   Needless to say, someone accused of sexual harassment will have a motive to lie about whether or not the accuser was their type. But if Smith genuinely isn't Jones's type, that's a reason that confers a non-zero degree of support to Jones did not sexually harass (or rape) Smith. In fact, such crimes only have to be a little bit about sex in order for such a defense to be valid in a weak sense.
   As I've said before, a lot of Trump's accusers are of a type (attractive or previously attractive blonde model-y types); I'm inclined to think that's some reason to believe at least some of them. Though I'm too lazy to articulate exactly why.
   I saw an account of a rape trial in the newspaper once. Though I'm not the most discriminating judge of male beauty, the accused seemed pretty hot--youngish, in good shape, well-groomed, tall, dark and handsome, as they used to say. All that sort of thing. The accuser was extremely unattractive in part on account of being morbidly obese. Now...I simply do not believe that I am not attracted to her is a weightless defense in such a case.
   What if we added to the case, say, that the guy was having all the sex in the world, always with very thin and attractive women, and that he had a well-documented (but non-psychotic) aversion to overweight women? That still doesn't count? At all?
   And don't give me the Hugh Grant response--that won't work. A few counterexamples are weightless when all I'm attributing to the argument is some nonzero degree of validity (in a non-deductive sense).
   So, anyway, the guy is a swine. And we might doubt the soundness of his Not My Type argument, because we might doubt the truth of the premise. But I don't believe that the argument form is invalid (in a weak, non-deductive sense).

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