The Tories have made it easy to get away with mistreating workers in the UK. They have cut the funding to employment tribunals to the point where it takes 8 months for a case to be heard.

Your Family Is None of Their Business.

You, too, are none of their business, but that point is more radical.

If you use Twitter, unfollow the bullshitter. Posting your outrage does not hurt him — it's what he wants.

One big danger of surveillance is that people come to believe that breaking a rule is impossible, and then it becomes unthinkable.

Al Franken now regrets resigning from the Senate. Some senators that pushed him to resign now regret that too.

The first (main) article does not state clearly whether Franken touched Tweeden in the process of making the photo, but it seems he did not. If that is correct, it was not a sexual act at all. It was self-mocking humor. The photograph depicted a fictional sexual act without her fictional consent, but making the photo wasn't a sexual act.

If it is true that he persistently pressured her to kiss him, on stage and off, if he stuck his tongue into her mouth despite her objections, that could well be sexual harassment. He should have accepted no for an answer the first time she said it. However, calling a kiss "sexual assault" is an exaggeration, an attempt to equate it to much graver acts, that are crimes.

The term "sexual assault" encourages that injustice, and I believe it has been popularized specifically with that intention. That is why I reject that term.

Meanwhile, Franken says he did not do those things, and the other actors he previously did the same USO skit with said it was not harassment, just acting. Tweeden's store is clearly false in many details.

Should we assume Tweeden was honest? With so many demonstrated falsehoods in her accusations, and given that she planned them with other right-wing activists, and that all of them follow a leader who lies as a tactic every day, I have to suspect that she decided to falsify accusations through exaggeration so as to kick a strong Democrat out of the Senate.

I have no proof of that suspicion. It is possible that she made the accusations honestly. Also, in a hypothetical world, someone might really have done them. Supposing for the moment that those accusations were true, should Franken have resigned over them?

I don't think so. They are misjudgments, not crimes. Franken deserved the chance to learn from the criticism that surprised him. Zero tolerance is a very bad way to judge people.

However, the most important point is to reject the position that if B feels hurt by what A said or did, then automatically A is wrong. People judged Franken that way, and he judged himself that way. But that way degrades the concept of "wrong" into a mere expression of subjective disapproval. What can legitimately be asserted subjectively can legitimately be ignored subjectively too. To judge A that way is to set B up as a tyrant.

If B's feelings were hurt, that's unfortunate -- but is that A's fault? If so, was it culpable, or just a mistake? That is what we have to judge, and if we want others to think our judgments worth following, they must be based on objective facts and objective standards, including objective standards for what words and gestures objectively mean.

Traister is wrestling with a solvable problem. She says, "When you change rules, you end up penalizing people who were caught behaving according to the old rules." Maybe people do, but that is a sign of carelessness. It isn't really hard to change the rules and then judge old actions by the old rules. We just have to remember to do so.