You are wrong. Kavanaugh is presumed innocent until there is evidence he is guilty. It is always the responsibility of the accuser to prove their assertion.  This is exactly why people ignore outrageous allegations all the time.

Further, Republicans have not fought tooth and nail to stop Ford from being heard. They immidiately reached out to her lawyers to arrange for her to speak to the Senate. It was those on the Left that were calling to delay her testimony, and were criticizing Republicans for "bullying" her into testifying.

There is evidence that Ford is lying, for one the fact that her story has changed over time, and secondly that all of the people she claims were at the gathering she was alleged assaulted at, say that no such gathering ever happened. 

This statement shows how much of a bad person you are Suchmoon. I am using your real name because you emailed me giving me permission to use your real life identity and said you were going to delete your message from your inbox -- based on your own standards, the fact that we are not in court means it is your responsibility to disprove this if you want your name removed. You are lucky I am not accusing you of running some kind of sex trafficking ring years ago, because by your own standards it would be acceptable for you to lose your job, and ability to earn a living when you cannot disprove this accusation that has zero evidence.

The principal of the presumption of innocence a the bedrock of anglo american jurisprudence, going back hundreds of years. This is such an important principal that the UN has declared this a human right, that nearly all modern democracies have established this as a right in their constitutions.

If your young child claimed that his sibling hit him without being provoked, you would not punish his brother without gathering some evidence to support this. If an employee claims her coworker stole money from the employer, an employer would not fire said employee without verifying evidence a theft actually occurred and that the employee is responsible. If someone claims your significant other is cheating on you, then you would not end the relationship without some form of corroboration and/or admission of guilt. If you claim you are the owner of a specific bank account, a bank employee will not allow you to withdraw funds from said account without verifying this is true.

Anyone who claims that one does not deserve the presumption of innocence is not just wrong, they are unethical, immoral, and should be shammed. Shame on you Suchmoon!

I actually think there are a fairly small number of threads in meta disputing bans (due to plagiarism), especially when compared to when BadBear was banning people for 'low effort posts + paid signature' wholesale. I also have noticed that many of these threads are asking why they have been banned, and often someone will post evidence they were copy/past spamming, and I also note that I understand the ban message is something along the lines of "sorry hilariousetc you have been banned by a forum moderator" when they are permmabanned, and does not have a specific reason, so it is possibly these people don't know they were caught plagiarizing.


I don't dispute this is a problem in the forum, I am totally in agreement this is a major issue that needs to be addressed. I have previously advocated the administration scrub posts for copy/paste posts posted, and to scrub posts of a plagiarism database.

I do not dispute that 50+ accounts are banned for this every day, however this is accounts and not necessarily people. We certainly do not see 50+ threads of people questioning why they are banned, substantially lower than that. Also, refer back to when BadBear was banning sig spammers wholesale, there were periods of time when there were many threads opened every day by people banned. This is also a fairly new problem, and it went from absolutely not a problem to being an epidemic almost overnight.

I have also noticed that many people caught copy/past spamming are low rank accounts, which means people are not earning very much from these copy/paste spamming. Many accounts have been caught copy/paste spamming as newbies, which previously could earn very little from paid signatures.

I suspect that many of the copy/paste spammers are probably people we don't really want here regardless of their copy/past spamming. I suspect they are either bump spammers, are engaging in some kind of 'black hat' SEO (either positive, or negative -- I am not sure), or are otherwise trying to create a false sense of interest in projects.  

One possible solution to accepting certain TOR traffic that you know is "perfectly-good traffic" would be to setup a hidden service as a reverse proxy for a specific person, possibly for a cost, and possibly that will only support a pre-determined amount of traffic.

For example, I could ask you to setup a hidden service that I can use to connect to the forum. I would pay you $xx for you to do this. You would then spin up a VPS that runs a hidden service that connects to the "real" IP address of the forum (it bypasses cloud flare) that is intended for only me to access. Our agreement could be that once the hidden service receives xx GB worth of traffic, then it will be shut down -- this will more or less prevent me from using the hidden service to DDoS the forum, or otherwise making the hidden service address public.

I am not sure if you can run multiple hidden services via one VPS/IP address, although I suspect there is a good chance you can.

This would reduce privacy incrementally, as it would expose sockpuppets that are all used to access this hidden service. However the location of the person accessing the hidden service would remain hidden from you, along with other sensitive information, such as their IP address, and ISP.  

There would still be the problem of how someone would access the forum in the first place, which is more complicated. One option would be to run a separate website with a separate server, whose only purpose is to sell access to these hidden services. This would be easier to maintain then a major forum, and when that website goes down, it would not affect the forum.

edit: you may not like this, however for added privacy, you may accept payment via certain privacy focused altcoins.

edit2:
One reason for this may be that the TOR devs don't want too much privacy when using tor in order to avoid the government regulate, or otherwise entirely break tor because too many serious criminals are hiding behind tor.

If the Republicans don't want to ask specific questions for political purposes, then the staffers who work for democrat senators can ask those questions, and all the questions would be asked.

Judge has said he is willing to answer whatever questions are asked of him in writing by Senate investigators. You say that "partisan republican investigators" will only ask softball questions, but you fail to mention that democrat investigators can ask all the questions they want, but declined to participate in the investigation.

All of those posts are in the english sections, and should only contain English. Using only my knowledge of the english language, I am not sure what any of those posts are trying to say. I would report them for being in the wrong language.

If the posts were longer or had more effort put into them, or I could otherwise understand what they were saying with the Russian words in the posts, I would leave the posts alone, or possibly suggest that a mod add a translation to the Russian words in a modnote.

Senate investigators spoke to all of the witnesses that Ford named. All of the witnesses denied having knowledge of the incident, nor the party/gathering that Ford described.

The Senate Republican investigators have already spoken to the same people that the FBI will speak to, and have already obtained the same information. The only reason Senate democrat investigators are not named is because they refused to participate, hence they are not interested in the truth.

What information do you think the FBI can uncover that Senate staffers would be unable to uncover?

Senate Democrat staffers refused to participate in investigations of any of the allegations, and refused to participate in the interviewing of any of the witnesses. 

I don't think there is a lot that Democrats can do to frustrate the President. Trump will be unable to move any of his legislative agenda forward, and will be unlikely to get most of his political appointees that need Senate confirmation confirmed, however beyond that, there is little the Democrats can do. The government may shut down, possibly for an extended period of time, however it is to be seen who would pay politically for that.

In order for Trump to be removed from office, a fairly substantial portion of hard line Republican Senators will need to support impeachment, possibly including some who believe Kavanaugh should be confirmed even if he is guilty of what Ford alleges. I would predict that Trump would get impeached multiple times by Democrats, but is unlikely to reach anywhere close to the necessary support for him to be removed from office.

To be clear, after witnessing what happened over the past two weeks, it will not be possible for Republicans to get anyone confirmed on the Supreme Court, ever, if Kavanaugh is not confirmed. Baseless accusations will be thrown against anyone right of center (and possibly anyone nominated by a Republican) nominated, and there will be calls to investigate such claims, and such investigations will not find any evidence to support such claims, then more outrageous accusations will be made, only to be followed by more investigations, more hearings, and more delays.

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What makes me the most upset about this entire process is just how transparent of a smear campaign against Kavanaugh this is. On it's face, the Ford allegation is at least somewhat plausible prior to hearing any response from Kavanaugh, however the accusations from the New Yorker, and especially from the Creepy Porn Lawyer are so outlandish, that they frankly do not warrant a response from Kavanaugh.

Further evidence this is a smear campaign is the blatant disregard and uninterest in the truth by Democrats. None of the Democrats asked Ford any substantial question that would assess the credibility of her or what she is saying, and they for the most part were questioning Kavanaugh about things like his yearbook and drinking habits, in attempts to further smear him, and his friends from High School. Over the past two weeks, many Democrats have publicly said that Kavanaugh is presumed guilty for various reasons, all of which are ridiculous, and should be chilling to every American, and also goes against any sense of even basic fairness. The presumption of guilt is something that we see in authoritarian countries.

In regards to Ford specifically, it is fairly clear she took steps over many years to prevent Kavanaugh on the supreme court. It has been argued that she disclosed the alleged assault to her therapist in 2012, however Kavanaugh was speculated to be a pick by Romney if he were to win the 2012 election.

This begs the question as to why Ford did not come forward during Kavanaugh's work on the Starr investigation into Bill Clinton (during which time, everyone on that team was both smeared and throughly investigated by those close to the Clintons), nor when Kavanaugh was nominated onto the DC court of appeals. I suspect the answer lies with Mark Judge.

In one line of questioning by Democrats on Thursday, one of the Senators asked Kavanaugh about a character in Mark Judge's book, "Brett O'Kavanaugh" to which Kavanaugh responded that this is a fictional book. I believe the book in question was published in 1997, so technically speaking the Clintons would have had access to it during the Star investigation, however the Kavanaugh-Judge relationship was probably too obscure to go looking at fictional writings of Judge. Fast forward to 2003, Google Books (or something closely titled) was launched, in which it became possible to search the text of books. The initial process of scanning books was fairly slow, and it took some time for Google to have a very wide catalog of books available for searching, so there is a good chance Judge's book was not available on Google Books in 2003 (-2006 when he was confirmed), but even if it was, there is a good chance, those looking into his past might not search Google Books because of its limited catalog. Fast forward to 2012, Ford could have researched the frontrunners to be nominated by Romney, saw the geographical connection from their early years, prompting her to find the Judge-Kavanaugh connection in Judge's book, and went from there.

Unfortunately, Republicans really botched the questioning both because the questioner did not have experience in cross-examining witnesses, and because the format (and time constraints) was horrible. There are multiple lines of questioning that I would have liked to see Rachael Mitchell pursue, however I would have liked to see Mitchell question Ford about any research she conducted on Kavanaugh prior to her making her allegation, and the timing of her therapy session in relation to this research.

In regards to Ford's lawyers, it is fairly clear they are acting as political operatives. Ford was referred to her 1st lawyer, Katz, by Senator Feinstein's office (or maybe it was Feinstein herself, I don't remember). Ford's lawyer got her to more or less immidiately get a polygraph test under very shady circumstances, under which IMO she had a very high probability of not being reported as deceitful (assuming she was lying during the test), ignoring the lack of underlying evidence the test actually took place, such as the machine readouts, and the video/audio of the test. There is not any evidence that Ford agreed to bear the cost, or was aware of the cost of the polygraph, indicating her lawyers intended on paying for it, absent sufficient GoFundMe funds.  Her lawyers also successfully delayed the hearing by a week under what can only be described as misleading circumstances, if not via outright lying. Her lawyers also made it very politically difficult for Republicans to meaningfully question Ford or her credibility by forcing a public hearing, even though Ford later said she preferred a private questioning in CA. It was Ford's lawyers who started the calls for an FBI investigation, even though the FBI would not be able to obtain any information that Senate staffers would be able to get.

In regards to the requests for an FBI investigation, this is clearly a farce, attempting to further delay a vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation. The FBI is unable to compel anyone to speak with them, while the Senate can issue a subpoena. The penalty for lying to an FBI agent is substantially the same as lying to a senate investigator under these circumstances. The FBI is not able to obtain any information that Senate investigators can obtain, and they don't know what specific questions Senators are interested in, while Senate investigators can work with Senators to ask specific questions. The claim that a Senate investigation is somehow "partisan" is ridiculous based on the fact that both Democrats and Republicans can investigate, although the Democrats refused to previously participate, which is further evidence of their dis-interest in learning the truth.  

Trump has tweeted regarding Kavanaugh:




Hopefully, the Senate will vote Kavanaugh in over the weekend/next week, and make the Supreme Court great again!

Kim Strassel made a very good point about all the requests for an FBI investigation:



The FBI doesn't even have the ability to compel anyone to talk to them, while the Senate does.

Her legal team was lying about the reasons why she cannot testify on Monday, and why she could not submit to interviews with Senate investigators.

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edit: The women also testified that she did not pay for the polygraph test, but does not know who paid for it.

The women from CA just testified that she traveled to DC via airplane, that she traveled to DE via airplane last summer, and that has traveled via airplane many times, often to get to vacations, and for business purposes.

This directly contradicts with her claimed fear of flying, and with her reasons to not be able to testify on Monday, as she claimed to be afraid of flying.

She also testified that she did not submit to interviews with Senate staffers because she did not want to fly, and that she was hoping the staffers would come to her location, however this directly conflicts with Senator Grassley's staffers offering to go to her location to interview her.

The Wall Street journal is reporting that the creepy porn lawyer has released an affidavit in which someone who hold a security clearance claims she was drugged in a party in 1982 in which Kavanaugh was in attendance.

Based upon the fact she hired the creepy porn lawyer, I am unwilling to give her any credibility at this time.

I am fairly confident those senators know that is about as a BS of a charge as the charges made by the women from CA and the women from Yale.

I don't think Plagiarism is something that needs to be pointed out as being something you can't do. First of all, this is something that people should know they shouldn't do, for a number of reasons, and I believe most people who do this know it is wrong, but do it anyway.

Also, I don't think it is as big of a problem in terms in the number of people getting into trouble doing this. Sure there are very many instances of this happening, however I suspect this is done by a fairly small number of people with a very large number of sockpuppet accounts, and I suspect this is often done via some kind of automation/AI.

This happens quite frequently with one of these parties. Unfortunately, in this case, the accusation is quite credible, yet those in power have scared anyone from seriously caring...

When has he lied under oath?

I think the analogy is more trying to determine if you are willing to act ethically and fairly when you are about to lose.

Your response answers that question.