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There's a difference between focusing on his "offenses" and saying "If you weren't a skeev then you wouldn't inevitably catch accusations like this."
I'm very comfortable saying I feel little sympathy for these women's accusations, and I feel little sympathy for Gaiman being accused. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, FAFO, he fucked the leopards... Pick your meme.
These are the same thing. It's like on 9/11, saying "Well, if the Americans hadn't been messing around in the Middle East, this wouldn't have happened."
Both statements are literally true (although @ArjinFerman has convinced me that terms like "inevitably" are too prone to bad faith literal interpretations). So the question then becomes "Was Neil Gaiman's behavior inappropriate (or at least unwise)?" and "Was American intervention in the Middle East inappropriate/unwise?" If you have principles of any sort, your answer will depend on what your principles say about sexual behavior and/or foreign policy. If you don't have principles, your answer will depend on who got got.
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And what can you back that statement with? As far as I can tell there's tonnes upon tonnes of sleeves that never get accused, so there's nothing inevitable about it, as well as there being people who literally haven't done anything but were accused (and I distinctly remember you joining in, in one prominent case).
Would you be saying this if he went postal and shot his accusers dead? Because the distance between a false accusation and murder doesn't seem much create than that between being a skeeev and putting in a false rape accusation.
Which prominent case are you referring to? If you're accusing me of hypocrisy or changing my position, you will have to be more specific.
I wouldn't consider Neil Gaiman going postal and shooting his accusers dead a likely or predictable consequence of being a starfucker.
My position is that he probably is guilty of, at the very least, being a skeevy old dude who's not above banging star struck young fans, but probably did nothing illegal and we should regard his accusers' claims skeptically.
Kavanaugh. It's not really about hypocrisy or changing your mind. Just a counterexample to the claim that not engaging in this behavior makes you immune to the accusations.
Please link to the post where I asserted "If you do not engage in this behavior, you are immune to accusations."
You're not being a tad pedantic here? The point of your comments isn't to say something like "this wouldn't have happened to him, if he wasn't acting like that"?
I can link the post where you say that accusations are an inevitable result of the sort of behavior he was engaging in, which is also incorrect in my opinion, but I'm not sure what's the point of autistically debating the literal meaning of an off the cuff statement.
Russel conjugation: you are being precise, I am being pedantic. The point of my comment is indeed that this probably wouldn't have happened to him if he weren't acting like that. That's not the same as claiming that baseless accusations never happen.
Would it make you feel better if I bowed to your pedantism and edited the post to remove "inevitably"? I mean, you know I did not literally mean absolutely 100% of the time with zero exceptions, right?
Ok, fair enough, guess I let my 'tism get the best of me.
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