A few quick comments:
i) Cain was never my first pick. For one thing, his 9-9-9 tax plan is inherently artificial. Moreover, I agree with Bachman that it simply gives the gov’t even more ways to overtax wage-earners.
His position on abortion is unintelligible. He doesn’t know his way around foreign policy.
ii) Cain denies the charges, but he’d do that if he were innocent or guilty, so that doesn’t carry any weight with me.
iii) I’m also not impressed by friends who assure us that “that’s not the Cain I know.” Duplicity would be expected in these situations.
iv) We need to distinguish between women who’ve come forward and spokesmen speaking on behalf of women who haven’t actually come forward. All we have to go by is the word of the spokesmen. And we have to assess the credibility of the accusers.
v) Thus far I don’t think we should throw Cain to the sharks for this reason. At the moment it looks like a hatchet job. That may change.
In addition, appeasement sets a bad precedent. That empowers the liberal establishment to destroy men on mere innuendo.
Assuming that the sexual harassment charges are true, so what?
ReplyDeleteIt's often admitted by Christians that, for instance, it would be better to have an atheist who knows how to do his job as president than a Christian who doesn't.
The idolatry of the atheist doesn't disqualify him for president. Likewise, the heresy of Romney. So why the sexual sins of Cain?
Cain isn't my first choice either. But talking about his sexual sins makes about as much sense as talking about Romney's heresy. ... Unless I'm missing something.
Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteSpeaking from a secular mentality (which Evangelicals often enough uncritically adopt), the personal choice of Romney to follow Mormonism and the individual decisions of atheists to deny God do not violate the sacred doctrine of autonomy. Sexual harassment does, forcing, or at least attempting to force, one individual to do what he or she does not wish to do. So it is a cultural sin of a much greater offense, generating more attention and outrage.
Steve wrote:
ReplyDelete"At the moment it looks like a hatchet job."
How so? The articles you linked ignore the most significant evidence against Cain. Much of what they say has little relevance to the details of the Cain case. Yes, the media are biased in their treatment of Cain, many liberal critics of Cain are being unreasonable and inconsistent, sexual harassment accusations sometimes are false, etc. But the best anti-Cain arguments take such factors into account. For those who aren't aware of it, I outlined the argument against Cain, which I find convincing, in the comments section of another thread. The articles you've linked repeat some of the misrepresentations and unreasonable arguments I addressed there.
This just in.
ReplyDeleteTriablogue gentlemen:
ReplyDeleteHere is the newest Cain accuser:
http://winteryknight.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/cain-accuser-karen-kraushaar-filed-a-sexual-harassment-claim-at-her-next-job-too/
Quote from the AP story:
A woman who settled a sexual harassment complaint against GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain in 1999 complained three years later at her next job about unfair treatment, saying she should be allowed to work from home after a serious car accident and accusing a manager of circulating a sexually charged email, The Associated Press has learned.
Karen Kraushaar, 55, filed the complaint while working as a spokeswoman at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Justice Department in late 2002 or early 2003, with the assistance of her lawyer, Joel Bennett, who also handled her earlier sexual harassment complaint against Cain in 1999. Three former supervisors familiar with Kraushaar’s complaint, which did not include a claim of sexual harassment, described it for the AP under condition of anonymity because the matter was handled internally by the agency and was not public.
To settle the complaint at the immigration service, Kraushaar initially demanded thousands of dollars in payment, a reinstatement of leave she used after the accident earlier in 2002, promotion on the federal pay scale and a one-year fellowship to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, according to a former supervisor familiar with the complaint. The promotion itself would have increased her annual salary between $12,000 and $16,000, according to salary tables in 2002 from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
[...]Kraushaar’s complaint was based on supervisors denying her request to work full time from home after a serious car accident in 2002, three former supervisors said. Two of them said Kraushaar also was denied previous requests to work from home before the car accident.
The complaint also cited as objectionable an email that a manager had circulated comparing computers to women and men, a former supervisor said. The complaint claimed that the email, based on humor widely circulated on the Internet, was sexually explicit, according to the supervisor, who did not have a copy of the email. The joke circulated online lists reasons men and women were like computers, including that men were like computers because “in order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.” Women were like computers because “even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.”
[...]Cain said he remembered gesturing to Kraushaar and noting that she was the same height as Cain’s wife, about chin-high to Cain. The Georgia businessman said Kraushaar did not react noticeably, but he said the restaurant association lawyer later told him that was the most serious claim that Kraushaar had made against him, “the one she was most upset about.”
[...]The New York Times reported previously that Kraushaar received $45,000 in the settlement with the restaurant association.
Wintery Knight,
ReplyDeleteThere are some problems with your latest article on Cain, some of the same problems I discussed in the thread I linked above. Bialek and Kraushaar aren't the only named witnesses. And the anonymity of some of the sources is mitigated by other factors involved, as I discussed in the previous thread. We frequently rely on anonymous sources in other contexts, and some of your criticisms of the Cain accusers are based on the testimony of unnamed sources. Have you noticed how often you and others on the pro-Cain side have been relying on the same sort of reasoning that you criticize when it's used by those of us on the anti-Cain side?
The title of your article tells us that Kraushaar "filed a sexual harassment claim at her next job, too". But the AP story you quoted tells us:
"Three former supervisors familiar with Kraushaar's complaint, which did not include a claim of sexual harassment, described it for the AP under condition of anonymity because the matter was handled internally by the agency and was not public."
She did complain about a joke of a sexual nature circulating on company computers, but she apparently didn't claim that it constituted sexual harassment. And notice that the AP is citing anonymous sources. I think those sources probably are reliable, and I don't object to the AP's use of them, but you and others on the pro-Cain side keeping making such an issue of the anonymity of anti-Cain sources. Are you being consistent?
You quote a portion of the AP story that repeats Cain's dubious suggestion that Kraushaar's most serious complaint against him was that he put his hand up to his chin and commented on her height. But you left out the portion of the AP story in which Kraushaar's lawyer denies Cain's assertion:
"Bennett told reporters at a news conference Wednesday that Kraushaar suffered multiple incidents of harassment and would not have filed a harassment claim based only on a comment about the height of Cain's wife. 'My client is an intelligent, well-educated woman. She would never file a sexual harassment complaint about a comment like that,' he said. Kraushaar will reveal specifics of her allegations against Cain at the joint news conference Bennett is trying to arrange with other accusers."
Why would you repeat Cain's assertion, which is dubious on its face, while not mentioning the denials of Kraushaar and her lawyer, both of whom have access to the relevant documentation?
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ReplyDeleteYou object to what's being done by "the liberal news networks", and I agree that there's a lot to criticize in the handling of this story by liberals (inside and outside the media), but what about Cain's conservative critics? Some of PJ Media's writers have been in contact with some of the witnesses against Cain, and they've said that they consider the witnesses credible. Some of the people who have claimed to have witnessed Cain's harassment or to have evidence of it in some other form are conservatives.
In your previous article, the one Steve linked above, you wrote:
"I see no reason to think that this Bialek’s claims have any more validity than Yeater’s claims. It seems plausible to me that both women are making false claims for the same reason – they want fame and money. Do women ever make false claims about sexual matters? Its more common than you might think. Studies show that false allegations are made about 20-40% of the time, depending on the study....In the absence of ANY evidence, why think that these anonymous charges against a black conservative who is leading in national polls are anything but greed and attention-whoring? Surely, we need to see some charges laid against Cain that where brought forward in a real criminal trial, so we can see the evidence. Otherwise, it just seems to me like another case of false paternity claims and false sexual allegations. We need to see real criminal charges, with real evidence and real witnesses from a real trial, before we can draw any conclusions."
But you keep drawing conclusions about Cain's critics without waiting for evidence from a trial. Why would we need such evidence? Do you apply the same reasoning to other areas of life, like Jesus' resurrection?
And what does it prove to refer to the possibility that a sexual harassment accusation is false? The existence of a large minority of harassment claims that are false still leaves us with a majority that aren't. Since Cain has several accusers alleging many incidents of harassment, it would take a long series of false accusations in order to explain what's happened.
Do you think PJ Media's conservative witnesses against Cain are motivated by "greed and attention-whoring"? What about Chris Wilson?
Are you aware that some of the arguments you and others are using against Cain's critics are highly similar to arguments that are often brought against Christianity (e.g., the anonymity of early Christian sources, the possibility that early Christian sources are wrong, the notion that the evidence for Christianity doesn't meet modern legal standards)?
JASON ENGWER SAID:
ReplyDelete"How so? The articles you linked ignore the most significant evidence against Cain. Much of what they say has little relevance to the details of the Cain case."
That's not obvious to me.
"The articles you've linked repeat some of the misrepresentations and unreasonable arguments I addressed there."
I disagree.
"But the best anti-Cain arguments take such factors into account. For those who aren't aware of it, I outlined the argument against Cain, which I find convincing, in the comments section of another thread."
Well, you link to an LA Times article that gives wildly conflicting accounts. So that's a wash.
You also link to Chris Wilson's allegations. however:
i) His claims are contradicted in the LA Times article you cite. So who should we believe?
ii) The "details" aren't very detailed. The word "inappropriate" keeps popping up. But what specifically did Cain allegedly say to women? Where are the direct quotes?
iii) Likewise, we're getting thirdhand accounts of who said what.
Is this evidence or is this gossip? Seems like rumor-mongering, which tends to feed on itself.
iv) In addition, Wilson is a Perry operative. That doesn't mean I discount his testimony. But by the same token, he's not impartial.
"Have you noticed how often you and others on the pro-Cain side have been relying on the same sort of reasoning that you criticize when it's used by those of us on the anti-Cain side?"
This is a comment you direct at Wintery Knight, although you allude to "others on the pro-Cain side," so I don't know if that includes me. If so:
i) I'm not pro-Cain.
ii) I agree with you that the reasoning often cuts both ways. But that's the problem. I don't have confidence in what the Cain campaign is saying–or its detractors.
So I'm not taking sides. At this point I'm withholding judgment.
Steve wrote:
ReplyDelete"Well, you link to an LA Times article that gives wildly conflicting accounts. So that's a wash."
Why is it a wash? As you said in your first post, "I’m also not impressed by friends who assure us that 'that’s not the Cain I know.' Duplicity would be expected in these situations." Would you expect everybody at the National Restaurant Association to know of Cain's misdeeds, if the accusations are correct? Or just some people? When I've worked for large companies, it's been my experience that different people in the company have different levels of knowledge about the character of their co-workers. A story about something a co-worker did might be known to one-third of the employees, but not known to the other two-thirds. I cited the Los Angeles Times story to support the conclusion that Cain's alleged behavior was known by other people at the National Restaurant Association. The fact that some people didn't know about that alleged behavior doesn't negate my point.
You write:
"His claims are contradicted in the LA Times article you cite."
How so? Are you referring to positive assessments of Cain's character by sources cited in the Los Angeles Times story? If so, I'd repeat what I said above. I wouldn't expect everybody in the company to know what Cain did. If Wilson had knowledge that some other people in the company didn't have, then the ignorance of those other people doesn't neutralize or outweigh what Wilson claims to have witnessed.
If you're referring to Wilson's "everybody knew" comment, then I think you're reading too much into it. Just before that comment, in the Politico story I linked in the other thread, Wilson referred to "so many people". The "everybody" seems to be either hyperbolic or referring to all of the people within a particular group, not every person who worked at the National Restaurant Association. Even if he meant the latter, which I doubt, we could still dismiss that comment as inaccurate, yet accept the general thrust of what he said.
You write:
"But what specifically did Cain allegedly say to women? Where are the direct quotes?"
I addressed the vagueness issue in the previous thread. See the last paragraph of my 8:46 P.M. post on November 6.
More specificity from Wilson would be better, but we can reach some significant conclusions without it. Given that he's a Republican supporting Rick Perry, it seems unlikely that he'd be defining his terms as a liberal feminist would, for example. He tells us that other people who were there agreed with his assessment. He tells us that he'd expect Cain's campaign to come to an end if the woman who was harassed came forward and told her story. And Wilson is a pollster. He probably knows a lot about public opinion, and he would know the cultural context of the Cain story. If Cain did something that would offend few people outside of liberal feminism, I doubt that Wilson would speak of it in the terms he chose to use.
The sort of vagueness you're objecting to is something we encounter in a lot of contexts in life. You expect readers to understand your Triablogue posts sufficiently without providing a definition of each term you use that different people might define in different ways. The Bible is often vague about the behavior of individuals it describes. A friend tells you that his supervisor at work has a short temper. A newspaper article refers to a man as obese. Terms like "short temper" and "obese" can be defined in different ways by different individuals. Does that mean we can't reach any significant conclusions about what was meant?
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ReplyDeleteYou write:
"Likewise, we're getting thirdhand accounts of who said what. Is this evidence or is this gossip? Seems like rumor-mongering, which tends to feed on itself."
That's not true of Wilson, who's an eyewitness, and it's not true of other sources I cited. If you think something I've cited is "gossip" or "rumor-mongering", then tell me what you have in mind and why you view it that way.
You write:
"In addition, Wilson is a Perry operative."
And the gospel authors were Christians, Josephus was a Jew, Tacitus was a Roman, etc. Wilson has biases, like everybody else. But he also has motives for telling the truth. For one thing, he can be contradicted by other people, especially when he puts his account in such a public setting and claims that so many other people were aware of it and were aware of Cain's treatment of women in general. If somebody wants to argue that Wilson's affiliation with Perry is so significant as to outweigh every motive he would have for being honest, then I'd like to see that argument. I'd also like to see that person try to apply that sort of reasoning consistently. Let's see how livable his life is if he keeps thinking that way. And let's apply the same reasoning to Cain and all of his supporters and the sources they cite.
You write:
"So I'm not taking sides. At this point I'm withholding judgment."
In the opening post of this thread, you said "it looks like a hatchet job". You then linked to five articles, all of which argue against Cain's critics. You keep starting new threads of the same nature. The Victor Davis Hanson article you linked above refers to Cain as "nothing but authentic". The Wintery Knight article tells us, "In the absence of ANY evidence, why think that these anonymous charges against a black conservative who is leading in national polls are anything but greed and attention-whoring?" And so on.
JASON ENGWER SAID:
ReplyDelete“Would you expect everybody at the National Restaurant Association to know of Cain's misdeeds, if the accusations are correct?”
But you seem to rely on Wilson as your primary source of information. In that event, it’s reducible to one source rather than multiple sources. He’s the conduit. One source claiming other sources.
“If Wilson had knowledge that some other people in the company didn't have, then the ignorance of those other people doesn't neutralize or outweigh what Wilson claims to have witnessed.”
And what did Wilson allegedly witness?
“Wilson declined to say specifically what Cain said or did to the woman, but that the CEO's actions made other individuals at the table uneasy. ‘It was very uncomfortable,’ said the pollster, recalling that other individuals present asked Cain to stop.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/67473.html
So Cain allegedly did something “very uncomfortable.”
“That's not true of Wilson, who's an eyewitness…”
An eyewitness who refuses to spell out what Cain said or did.
“And the gospel authors were Christians, Josephus was a Jew, Tacitus was a Roman, etc. Wilson has biases, like everybody else.”
i) We should often take bias into account. For instance, it depends on what caused the bias. Holocaust survivors are biased against Nazis–for good reason.
ii) Apropos (i), there is good bias and bad bias. Methodological naturalism is a case of bad bias. Bias is good if bias aligns with an accurate worldview.
iii) Bias makes hostile corroboration evidentially useful.
iv) Bias is often inequitably distributed in the same individual. Josephus has a Pharisaic bias. But that’s not a universal filter.
“If somebody wants to argue that Wilson's affiliation with Perry is so significant as to outweigh every motive he would have for being honest, then I'd like to see that argument.”
That’s a caricature of what I wrote.
“In the opening post of this thread, you said ‘it looks like a hatchet job’. You then linked to five articles, all of which argue against Cain's critics.”
i) That’s not taking sides. Rather, that’s presenting the other side.
ii) And, as I’ve explained on more than one occasion now, Cain is something of a side-issue. My larger concern is how this illustrates the dangers of sexual harassment allegations, where mere accusations can destroy a man’s reputation and career.
Steve wrote:
ReplyDelete"But you seem to rely on Wilson as your primary source of information. In that event, it’s reducible to one source rather than multiple sources."
I'm relying on multiple sources, and the non-Wilson sources aren't dependent on Wilson.
You write:
"And what did Wilson allegedly witness?"
See my earlier comments on vagueness. The vagueness weakens the case against Cain, and I think the accusers should be more specific, as I've said before. But Wilson and others have been specific enough to warrant my conclusion. Wilson is making his comments in a larger context that gives us some idea of what he's referring to. He's a Republican affiliated with Rick Perry, a highly conservative candidate. I doubt that Wilson is defining his terms in something like a liberal feminist manner. And he's addressing charges of sexual harassment, so we know he's addressing behavior of a sexual nature, and he thinks it's bad enough to end Cain's campaign.
You write:
" So Cain allegedly did something 'very uncomfortable.'"
In the context of sexual harassment. And Wilson has said that it was bad enough that Cain's campaign would probably come to an end if the woman came forward with her story.
You said:
"An eyewitness who refuses to spell out what Cain said or did."
Both sides have been vague on some points, as I said earlier. The issue is what we make of what we have. I've explained why my view of Wilson makes more sense of the information we have. As I mentioned in another thread, we're not in a court of law that requires us to meet a standard of proof beyond mere probability. All it takes is a slight probability of Cain's guilt to justify my position.
You write:
"That’s a caricature of what I wrote."
Since you didn't explain what significance you think Wilson's affiliation with Perry has, I addressed a possible objection to that affiliation. If you want to object to it from some other angle, then explain what you have in mind.
You write:
"And, as I’ve explained on more than one occasion now, Cain is something of a side-issue. My larger concern is how this illustrates the dangers of sexual harassment allegations, where mere accusations can destroy a man’s reputation and career."
I agree with that sort of larger concern, but the details of the Cain case have been part of the discussion as well.