Free Republic

I'm impressed with Alyssa Milano. This is the kind of convoluted series of rationalizations you would expect from a career Washington Post columnist, not a former sitcom actress who became famous for tweeting a hashtag. The fallacies are obvious. In defending her support for Biden, she keeps using women as a collective group. As if she and her decisions represent all women. There are the strawmen and the false choices, accompanied by a distortion of history.  As an activist, it can be very easy to develop a black and white view of the world: things are clearly wrong or clearly...

As we started holding politicians and business leaders and celebrities around the world accountable for their actions, it was easy to sort things into their respective buckets: this is wrong, this is right. Holding people accountable for their actions was not only right, it was just. Except it’s not always so easy, and living in the gray areas is something we’re trying to figure out in the world of social media. But here’s something social media doesn’t afford us–nuance. The world is gray. And as uncomfortable as that makes people, gray is where the real change happens. Black and white...

Sometimes it’s hard not to resort to insults and this is one of those times. Alyssa Milano has written a piece for Deadline explaining why she still supports Joe Biden even though the evidence as it stands now points in the general direction of him being guilty of sexual assault. It has the not terribly original title “Living in the Gray as a Woman.” You can probably imagine without even reading it how this piece is going to attempt to let Milano recede into uncertainty. The person who championed “#BelieveWomen” is now tap-dancing around epistemic uncertainty. But actually, what she’s...

[snip] Living in the Gray as a Woman When I sent the #MeToo tweet which helped spark a movement by amplifying the work of Tarana Burke in 2017, I didn’t know what it would bring. I knew I was in pain. I knew millions of women around the world were in pain. And I knew how lonely that pain was, how isolating the experience of being a victim of sexual assault was, and how bad it was for us as a nation and as a species. But then it took off, and a moment became a movement that had been...