Monica Lewinsky’s Ted Talk

Posted by Steven D | Jun 25, 2015 | 31 |

I just watched one of the most amazing TED Talks I’ve ever seen, and it was given by Monica Lewinsky. Yes, that woman.

I confess I hadn’t given her much thought since the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency. I remember reading about the blue dress, see the pictures of her in that beret, and reading many of the all too numerous and salacious stories about her affair with the President. I remember watching the news shows where she was labeled a bimbo, a temptress, a victim, a home-wrecker, a [insert the derogatory word of your choice here]. I frankly can’t recall what I thought of her back then, but I’m sure it wasn’t flattering, even though even I did not listen to the tapes of her phone conversations posted online, which many did. If I thought of her at all since then, it was as a less than fully human figurine – as a one dimensional stereotype, the caricature that the media, online and offline, constructed out of this one brief moment in her life’s story.

I should have thought better of her, though. I should have remembered my own younger self, and my own numerous mistakes at that age. I should have shown a little compassion. But I didn’t think to do so. Shame on me.

Oddly enough, compassion is at the heart of Monica Lewinsky’s TED talk which is titled “The Price of Shame.” I just finished watching it. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen as she recounted her experiences of public humiliation at the dawn of the internet age, and how it drove her to thoughts of suicide. These thoughts she expressed to her parents made them afraid to let her out of their sight during the worst of her ordeal. But the TED talk she gave is not merely about her past, it is about our online present and the wave of cyber-bullying and public online shaming that afflicts so many in our present day. What she had to say on that topic resonated deeply with me. Please watch it:

If you finished watching her talk, you’ll notice she didn’t speak only about herself. What she focused on, using her own experience as a prime example, was the manner in which the internet has coarsened our society. Every day, the worst angels of our nature are on display online in the constant flood of nastiness, name-calling, and general dehumanization and degradation of others. People – children – are targeted on social media with consequences that have led to a rash of suicides and suicidal impulses among those being bullied. The most vulnerable are often the ones hurt the most – women, minorities, and LGBTQ people.

I know from seeing the personal experiences of my children’s friends and from hearing their stories that it was bad, but I had no idea of the extent of this epidemic. Among a survey of 10,000 youth in the UK conducted in 2013 by by Ditch the Label I found the following revelations – or at least they were revelations to me:

Roughly 70% of the respondents had been bullied online.

Thirty-seven percent were bullied on a frequent basis.

In the US of A, the statistics are just as frightening.

Every 7 MINUTES a child is bullied. Adult intervention – 4%. Peer intervention – 11%. No intervention – 85%.

Bullied students tend to grow up more socially anxious, with less self-esteem and require more mental health services throughout life.

1 MILLION children were harassed, threatened or subjected to other forms of cyberbullying on FACEBOOK during the past year.

88% of social media-using teens say they have seen someone be mean or cruel to another person on a social network site. 12% of these say they witness this kind of behavior “frequently.”

Of course, harassment and bullying and cruelty online are hardly limited to our young people. Adults partake of this activity all the damn time. Some examples of things that didn’t exist in my twenties and thirties, but are all too prevalent now:

Revenge porn

Cyber-stalking

Online harassment

We have the technology and we are using it badly. Every day, someone receives a threat online, is bullied online, has their personal information exposed online, is shamed and humiliated online. Every day people experience the emotions of fear, anger, frustration, terror because of actions taken by other people – online. Every day someone thinks about killing themselves, and many eventually follow through on those thoughts and commit suicide, because of what was revealed about them publicly online and what was said about them online and what was done to them – online.

It is easy, I imagine, for many reading this to think that this is all overblown hyperbole. That these kids and adults should toughen up, get thicker skin, grow a pair. The whole “words can never hurt me” mantra. To anyone who believes that, however, I say you could not be more wrong. Words lead to actions, and actions with real world consequences all too often. And the sheer scope and extent of the online experience can overload the minds of vulnerable people in ways that simply did not occur in the past. Bullying can now occur around the clock, 24/7.

When I was bullied in my youth, I always knew that I could escape the bullying after I was alone at home. I always knew that there were a limited number of people who witnessed my humiliation. That is not the case anymore. We live in a connected world. We are immersed in it. Even when we are offline, others – friends, family, strangers – can be reading negative things posted about us, and when we return we find that the nightmare is 1000 times worse than we could have ever imagined.

Monica relates the tragic story of Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers whose roommate secretly used a webcam to make a video of Tyler having sex with another man. When that video was released online the result was as predictable as it was tragic and completely unnecessary.

The roommate viewed him in an intimate act, and invited others to view this online. Tyler discovered what his abuser had done and that he was planning a second attempt. Viewing his roommate’s Twitter feed, Tyler learned he had widely become a topic of ridicule in his new social environment. He ended his life several days later by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. Tyler was eighteen years old.

Monica in her talk specifically recalls for her audience speaking to her mother at the time that Tyler’s death garnered national attention. For those of you who did not watch the video, here is what she said:

My mom was beside herself about what happened to Tyler and his family, and she was gutted with pain in a way that I just couldn’t quite understand, and then eventually I realized she was reliving 1998, reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night, reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open, and reliving a time when both of my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death, literally.

Today, too many parents haven’t had the chance to step in and rescue their loved ones. Too many have learned of their child’s suffering and humiliation after it was too late. Tyler’s tragic, senseless death was a turning point for me. It served to recontextualize my experiences, and I then began to look at the world of humiliation and bullying around me and see something different. In 1998, we had no way of knowing where this brave new technology called the Internet would take us. Since then, it has connected people in unimaginable ways, joining lost siblings, saving lives, launching revolutions, but the darkness, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming that I experienced had mushroomed. Every day online, people, especially young people who are not developmentally equipped to handle this, are so abused and humiliated that they can’t imagine living to the next day, and some, tragically, don’t, and there’s nothing virtual about that. ChildLine, a U.K. nonprofit that’s focused on helping young people on various issues, released a staggering statistic late last year: From 2012 to 2013, there was an 87 percent increase in calls and emails related to cyberbullying. A meta-analysis done out of the Netherlands showed that for the first time, cyberbullying was leading to suicidal ideations more significantly than offline bullying. And you know what shocked me, although it shouldn’t have, was other research last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion than either happiness or even anger.

So what is the answer to this horrible situation of our own creation? It’s not that difficult to do, or at least it shouldn’t be. Show empathy and compassion to those who are the subject of harassment. Don’t respond to cruelty shown to you with more cruelty. Do you remember this Daily Kos diary posted not so long ago, about a young African American woman who chose to respond to online hate with compassion? I do.

Most importantly, stand up to those who you see being harassed and bullied. Let them know that not everyone hates them or wants to shame them or humiliate them. As Monica stated, it doesn’t take much to make a big difference.

Shame cannot survive empathy. I’ve seen some very dark days in my life, and it was the compassion and empathy from my family, friends, professionals, and sometimes even strangers that saved me. Even empathy from one person can make a difference. The theory of minority influence, proposed by social psychologist Serge Moscovici, says that even in small numbers, when there’s consistency over time, change can happen. In the online world, we can foster minority influence by becoming upstanders. To become an upstander means instead of bystander apathy, we can post a positive comment for someone or report a bullying situation. Trust me, compassionate comments help abate the negativity.

How much pain and suffering can we alleviate by simply standing up for those who are being abused? By showing empathy for those who are the subject of online bullying or harassment? By changing how we choose to interact with others on the internet? I don’t know, but a damn sight more than refusing to change, refusing to help, refusing to show simple compassion for the suffering of others, even others who show hate or anger toward us.

I know, what a radical leftist idea. A fool’s errand, some might say. Something that will never happen in a million years. You can’t change human nature, the world, etc, etc., etc.

Well, we won’t if we don’t try, now, will we?.

About The Author

Steven D

Father of 2 children. Faithful Husband. Loves my country, but not the GOP.

31 Comments

Phil Perspective on June 25, 2015 at 11:42 am

If you finished watching her talk, you’ll notice she didn’t speak only about herself. What she focused on, using her own experience as a prime example, was the manner in which the internet has coarsened our society.

Did the internet really do that? Limbaugh was already on the air being disgusting before the internet took off. It might have turned the dial up from 7 to 11 but the internet isn’t solely to blame.
Arthur Gilroy on June 25, 2015 at 11:47 am

So Booman…what is it that you want to do about this? I mean…here are two things that are not going to change:

1-The internet is not going to go away.

and

2-Overall, human beings are not going to change their stripes.

So…how are you going to stop internet “bullying?” We haven’t been able to stop bullying on the playgrounds or the streets of civilized countries for millennia; we haven’t been able to stop it in bigger systems (I mean…”bullying” is just another word for how capitalism and politics in general are conducted, really.), and we have not been able to stop the ultimate bullying, which is war. So…watchoo gonna do? Bully the bullies into stopping their bullying? Censor them somehow? Who’s going to be the censoring authority? Isn’t censoring a form of bullying, really? Please.

Further…you could look at Monica Lewinsky’s plight as an object lesson for other people who are tempted to do something as stupid as “falling in love” with an older person who is quite plainly a sexual predator. I am sorry for her pain, but let’s state this quite clearly. She fucked up, and she paid a terrible price. If that’s the only layer you wish to examine, of course.

But there’s more.

Much more.

You could (and should) also look also at the whole situation in another light. I believe that Lewinsky was used by people who were essentially espionage agents in an attempt to bring down the President of the United States or at least so embarrass him and his party that the next election would go to the opposition. They were quite successful, too. King George W. was soon (s)elected by a fixed election and a bought-and-sold Supreme Court, and then the (~~too~~)-soon-thereafter 9/11 dumbshow allowed the neocons to bullrush the U.S. population into a Blood-For-Oil war that those neocons believed was necessary for the survival of the U.S…and Israel, bet on it…as they want it to be.

So it goes.

I refer you to the following webpage for a very nice précis of the whole rotten underbelly of this thing.

Category:Lewinsky Affair

A couple of quotes are in order:

Linda Tripp

She remained at the White House with the Clinton administration. She was the last person to talk to Vince Foster before he committed suicide, July 1993. First person to talk to Kathleen E. Willey after she left the Oval Office, 29 November 1993. She had contacts with the Special Counsel Robert Fiske’s office in 1994, pushing murder theories about Vince Foster “among other matters” and then continued under Kenneth Starr. She transferred to the Pentagon 21 August 1994.
    1    Tripp background Tripp worked for highly classified Army intelligence and commando units in the 1980s, such the Delta Force: “I’ve worked on the covert side of the Department of Defense,” she testified before a House committee investigating the Vince Foster suicide.

    2    Tripp’s Bush employment Clerical worker recruited by George H. W. Bush’s White House, working for C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel, and during this time it was alleged that Tripp was the source of the never-proven allegations that Bush had a mistress named Jennifer. Tripp’s friends during this period were Tony Snow, who became a conservative journalist and Clinton detractor, who later put Tripp in contact with Lucianne Goldberg, and Gary Aldrich, a White House Secret Service agent who wrote a scurrilous book about Clinton.

    3    Tripp’s veracity Questions have been raised of her supposedly “apolitical” motives in betraying a friend and she swore in her grand jury testimony she “had never even thought about the independent council in [her] wildest dreams” while taping the Lewinsky conversations.

    1    Tripp’s criminal record Linda Tripp was arrested on a felony charge of grand larceny, to which she pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of loitering, May 1969. Later when questioned for getting her Pentagon security clearance she failed to reveal this episode, a felony under federal law. Judicial Watch was behind the effort to “expose” Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon as the man who revealed to The New Yorker that Linda Tripp lied on her application for a security clearance about her arrest record. The New Yorker’s original source for the story was Tripp’s ex-stepmother. All the Pentagon did was confirm what the former stepmother had said.

    2    Newsweek article Tripp became major source for an anti-Clinton article by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, published August 1997.

    3    Tripp lawyers Tripp earned $88,000 salary but maintained two lawyers.

—snip;—

    6    Lucianne Goldberg

    7    Lucianne Goldberg New York literary agent Lucianne Goldberg who was a self-avowed Nixon-era trickster (“Chapman’s Friends”) and a spy for Nixon’s campaign against McGovern posing as a magazine reporter providing information to Republican operative Murray Chotiner. She had strong right-wing links, a self-described Clinton-hater and gossip trader with Matt Drudge.

    8    Goldberg background Goldberg told the McGovern campaign that she worked for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) and later for Women’s News Service. The addresses she listed for both agencies then was the same as her residence on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1990s, 1972.

    1    Goldberg CIA connection

Lucianne Goldberg replaced CIA agent Seymour Freidin in August 1972 reporting on the McGovern campaign that fall. “They were looking for really dirty stuff,” she said. “Who was sleeping with whom, what the Secret Service men were doing with the stewardesses, who was smoking pot on the plane – that sort of thing.” In August, 1973, it was learned that a free-lance writer, Goldberg was paid $1,000 a week by the Republican Party during the 1972 presidential election campaign spying on the Democratic Party’s candidates. Goldberg is said to have received a total of more than $10,000 plus expenses. Goldberg’s 1972 claim to be affiliated with NANA takes on additional significance. Goldberg was also close to Victor Lansky.

    2    North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) Had strong connections with CIA: Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who had numerous CIA and State Department links, worked for NANA when she interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow in 1959. Another NANA reporter, Virginia Prewett, was an anti-Castro activist recruited by NANA founder Ernest Cuneo, a high-ranking OSS veteran. NANA was acquired by a partnership between Leonard Marks, Drew Pearson and Fortune Pope, mid-1960s. In 1952, Fortune Pope’s brother, Generoso Pope, Jr., bought the National Enquirer. Generoso was a CIA officer in 1951. Marks and Pearson were also had links with the CIA.

    3    Victor Lasky (d. 1990) More than a simple right-wing columnist whose syndicated column was distributed by NANA 1962-1980, he was a public relations executive for Radio Liberty 1956-1960, which was one of the CIA’s two largest propaganda operations at the time (other, Radio Free Europe). It was revealed during Watergate testimony that Lasky was secretly paid $20,000 by Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President while he was writing his column. CREEP included a number of CIA operatives. In the mid-1980s, Lasky was close to CIA director William Casey.

    4    Jonah Goldberg Lucianne Goldberg’s son was employed by Ben Wattenberg.

    5    Ben Wattenberg Think-tank activist who was intimately involved with CIA-linked contra support activities during the 1980s, was also vice-chairman of the Board for International Broadcasting, which was created by Congress in 1973 in an attempt to remove Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty from the taint of direct CIA control. His son Daniel Wattenberg, a conservative writer who hounded the Clintons, was a special assistant to convicted Iran-contra figure Elliott Abrams.

    9    Goldberg connections Lucianne Goldberg had personal and direct connections to Monica Lewinsky, Jerome M. Marcus, Theodore B. Olson, David Pike (Jones lawyer), Richard W. Porter, Alfred Regnery, Peter W. Smith, Tony Snow (conservative commentator), and Linda Tripp.

    10    Goldberg/Tripp connection Tony Snow, conservative commentator, who worked in the Bush White House, introduced Linda Tripp to literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, early 1994.

    1    “Master puppeteer” Tripp’s expression for Lucianne Goldberg.

    2    Tripp tapes Lucianne Goldberg instructed Linda Tripp to make the Tripp tapes that yielded about 24 hours of confession and gossip by Monica S. Lewinsky about her sexual relations with Pres. Clinton, late September 1997. One other point ignored was out-of-chronology sequences on the tapes that cast doubts on their integrity. The recording began, as testified by Tripp, 3 October 1997.

    11    Note Lucianne Goldberg’s son Jonah claimed he had heard some of Tripp’s tapes in September 1997.

Whaddayou, kiddin’ me or what!!!??? A major plot to depose the President of the United States was successfully put into play by internationally connected forces and 16 years later we’re supposed to cry crocodile tears because “bullying” is one of the faux hype catchwords of the so-called “progressive” internet?

PLEASE!!!

WTFU.

Later…

AG
on June 25, 2015 at 1:00 pm

It’s true. We shouldn’t bully people.

And it’s true that there seems to be a recurrent theme of women insinuating themselves into compromising positions with mostly politicians on the left over the last half century. What is it about liberal politicians who attract these (I’ll use Booman’s term) “temptresses”. They seem to have replaced lone nuts in repressing liberal politics. I am reminded of Donna Rice, I believe her name was, becoming good friends with Fawn Hall after Fawn helped Ollie North destroy Ollie’s trail of treason and Donna wriggled in Gary Hart’s lap on The Monkey Business, Rice and her tush thus eliminating the biggest threat to the status quo since Robert Kennedy.

When someone like Lewinsky is getting her “guidance” from CIA operative Lucianne Goldberg (whose greatest accomplishment after orchestrating the Clinton scandal was birthing her pudgy son propagandist who was able to confuse a generation of right-wingers about fascism) one should beware of the message behind the message that Lewinsky may be carrying.

So my public position is, yes, we shouldn’t bully people in the press, this a week after professional liberals were outraged, outraged (see Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon) over Rachel Dolezal for the awful sin of living her life as a black woman. You know how it works. Tell half the story, slanted to make readers hate your target. Three or four days into the scandal begin circulating the jokes. I believe one of the things Williams wrote about Dolezal is that what Dolezal had done was “unforgiveable”. How does Williams find herself in a position of forgiving or not forgiving Dolezal? She doesn’t have any standing, but presumes to in order to whack Dolezal again and again.

People who had been shocked by cops all across the country routinely shooting blacks and then lying about it immediately returned to the position that the cops who had investigated hateful acts directed at Dolezal must have thoroughly investigated and debunked her claims, because cops don’t lie about the people we hate, as if we were back in a Norman Rockwell picture, this in a region of our country where Mark Fuhrman retired to get away from “them”.

Please note when these marginal public figures who once sprang from scandals find a second career in the media. Didn’t Fawn Hall have some kind of Christian scam against porn going on for awhile? Or was that Donna Rice?
- Arthur Gilroy on June 25, 2015 at 1:40 pm
  
  On one level they are all trying to make a profit in their 15 nano-seconds of fame.
  
  That’s all there is to it, really.
  
  Make a mistake; get caught; ‘fess up; wait a while and then try to make some money off of the situation.
  
  That’s the deal.
  
  Bet on it.
  
  AG
  - on June 25, 2015 at 2:48 pm
    
    As you should recognize, Arthur, when find yourself with Lucianne Goldberg, Linda Tripp and Bill Clinton’s sperm, you are at least ripe for rightwing exploitation. Organized exploitation by the keepers of the status quo should not be discounted.
    
    So here’s a question: Has Lewinsky ever talked about Goldberg, acknowledged Goldberg’s connections to the CIA and NANA? Talked about her suspicions of Tripp and Goldberg? Is it because after all these years she is still unaware or is she still playing a role?
    
    As far as I can throw her.
    - Arthur Gilroy on June 25, 2015 at 4:45 pm
      
      I doubt that she knew she was being used at the time. She was probably just a headstrong young woman who felt flattered that she was getting the attentions of a president and was being counselled by an older woman…Tripp…on how to get away with it.. Maybe daydreams of becoming Mrs. Clinton II flitted through her little head. Or…who knows, she might also be the most effective dumb act spy queen of all history. Doubtful though.I’m sure that something would have surfaced as evidence of her witting involvement after the amount of media attention she drew.
      
      Now?
      
      What choices does she have? Is she witting now? Cooperating with her masters? Maybe. I read her differently, myself. I think that she’s just getting over…and getting off as well, just as she did with Clinton’s attentions…on her notoriety. I dunno how she makes her living, but another bout of fleeting famd will pay her something, for sure. A so-called “tell-all” book, maybe a movie about the whole scene…something.
      
      Gotta eat; gotta keep up the looks with whatever she’s using.
      
      So it goes.
      
      Later…
      
      AG
      - on June 26, 2015 at 2:05 pm
        
        At the time…
        
        She’s had two decades to figure this out. If she hasn’t figured out what happened she’s too dumb to pay attention to. If she’s keeping quiet she’s complicit.
      - Arthur Gilroy on June 26, 2015 at 4:24 pm
        
        Precisely.
        
        Thank you.
        
        AG
- The Voice In The Wilderness on June 25, 2015 at 2:52 pm
  
  Power is an aphrodisiac.
- Steven D on June 25, 2015 at 5:07 pm
  
  As far as I know Lewinsky hasn’t had any connection to Goldberg for years, if at all. Goldberg worked with Tripp to have her secretly tape phone conversations with Lewinsky. Your comment smacks of continuing to assassinate her character for a mistake that happened 19 years ago. I’m disappointed frankly.
  - on June 26, 2015 at 2:09 pm
    
    Not sure if your criticism was aimed at me or Arthur.
    
    If you are still defending her for alleged ignorance twenty years ago at the time of the scandal and ignore the silence over the last twenty years you seem to be saying that people can never learn from their past.
- Phil Perspective on June 25, 2015 at 5:51 pm
  
  And it’s true that there seems to be a recurrent theme of women insinuating themselves into compromising positions with mostly politicians on the left over the last half century. What is it about liberal politicians who attract these (I’ll use Booman’s term) “temptresses”. They seem to have replaced lone nuts in repressing liberal politics. I am reminded of Donna Rice, I believe her name was, becoming good friends with Fawn Hall after Fawn helped Ollie North destroy Ollie’s trail of treason and Donna wriggled in Gary Hart’s lap on The Monkey Business, Rice and her tush thus eliminating the biggest threat to the status quo since Robert Kennedy.
  
  Gary Hart was a Blue Dog/DLC’er back then. Democratic politicians are forced to resign, for what ever reason, when stuff like this happens. GOPers rarely are. Why the hypocrisy? No idea. I have a few ideas though.
  - The Voice In The Wilderness on June 25, 2015 at 9:52 pm
    
    Family Values (TM)
MNPundit on June 25, 2015 at 1:52 pm

Geez, 20 years and she STILL doesn’t use makeup on her cheeks right.
- Arthur Gilroy on June 25, 2015 at 2:04 pm
  
  She wants people to recognize her.
  
  AG
  - MNPundit on June 25, 2015 at 2:50 pm
    
    Success!
- Steven D on June 25, 2015 at 4:59 pm
  
  You know, that’s a pretty sexist and demeaning thing to say.
  - MNPundit on June 26, 2015 at 12:38 pm
    
    Probably. In fact I think the content of her speech is worthy. Internet public shaming is fun but regularly goes to far and certainly invading someone’s life whether through doxxing, media like with her or simply never giving someone a moments peace from online harassment is a real problbem.
    
    I thought her cheek make up was bad in 90’s and I still do. At least for me, critiquing sla public figure’s appearance in public (from Cannes more than the video) is separate from how I’ll take content of her speech.
Arthur Gilroy on June 25, 2015 at 2:03 pm

Further…if I had absolutely no idea of who this woman is or what she’s done, my bullshit detector would go off about 3 seconds into her talk. You have heard of crocodile tears, right? She has a crocodile smile. Sorry, but there it is. A cross between a smile and a sneer. A “snile.” I envision a croc smiling like that as it waits for its next meal to amble into view.

Like dat, only seriouser and seriouser, to mangle a Lewis Carroll phrase.

Curiouser and curiouser too, once you begin to delve into the many mirrors and rabbit holes used by the spook brigade to influence mainstream politics.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Bet on it.

Later…

AG
- Steven D on June 25, 2015 at 4:58 pm
  
  Arthur, I am disappointed in you. Not surprised, just disappointed. Your comments to this story about Ms. Lewinsky have been pretty sexist and reflect on you poorly. I was going to ignore them but I decided that what you are doing here is exactly what this story is about – bullying, nastiness, harassment.
  - Arthur Gilroy on June 26, 2015 at 12:31 am
    
    They are not “sexist,” SD. I would say the same thing about a male. I would say the same thing…spun a little differently perhaps, because of situational considerations…about say Donald Trump. A crocodile smiling.
    
    Had it been a woman of position and a younger male underling…I would say the same thing.
    
    Had it been a homosexual situation…I would say the same thing.
    
    Ain’t about gender. Only about the abuse of power. Bet on it.
    
    AG
    
    P.S. “Bullying!!!???” You are running the same game as are those who equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Lewinsky’s chosen to re-enter in the game. Sorry, but there it is. Had she simply stepped away and stayed away after her initial mistake? No “bullying”…no nuthin’ as far as I am concerned…and best of luck to her. I made my own sexual mistakes, including some later in life than hers although certainly not on the same national stage. So it goes. We are all going to fuck up. In real life, it’s all about how you handle your mistakes.
    
    How she’s handling them?
    
    She asked for it. She got it. A mainstream, middle class Toyota at best.
    
    I hope the possible rewards are worth the sacrifice of self-worth, and best of luck to her.
    
    She’s gonna need it.
Marie3 on June 25, 2015 at 2:18 pm

How are we as a society supposed to promulgate respect for others, including their privacy, on the Id-net when our government and corporations violate the privacy of all of us?

Good manners was once something that adults practiced and taught the young. Formal good manners were rules that facilitated a modicum of peaceful co-existence. Yet, in the practice of treating others well and with respect, a degree of empathy was also internalized.
- MNPundit on June 25, 2015 at 2:53 pm
  
  The problem is good mamners never really did anything to mitigate rudeness. You were still just as discriminated against if you were brown or black.
  
  While it is usually grossly misused for abuse (gamergate) I LIKE public shaming. If someone posts an anti gay tirade I want to be able to tell them they are BAD and should FEEL BAD. And I want everyone else to tell them too.
  - Marie3 on June 25, 2015 at 4:23 pm
    
    Nobody with good manners goes on a anti-gay tirade. (Or racist, sexist, etc. tirade for that matter.) When someone does, it’s sufficient for one person to point out that the speaker is rude and pathetic. More attention than that risks negatively reinforcing the speaker’s prejudices and desire for attention. Bullying for a good cause is still bullying.
    - Vic78 on June 26, 2015 at 9:53 am
      
      The best way to deal with a bully is through an ass kicking. Remember how the President and Seth Myers dealt with Donald Trump’s stupid ass? That’s what bullies need.
      - Marie3 on June 26, 2015 at 10:54 am
        
        iirc Donald Trump is officially running for President. Not that he has a chance, but that “ass kicking” didn’t have much impact. OTOH, if everyone had ignored this ass, his 2016 POTUS campaign would more likely be like all his earlier one; IOW non-existent.
Parallax on June 25, 2015 at 2:51 pm

Thanks for posting this, Booman. At the time, I was dating a young woman at the time who was seriously Catholic and had remained a virgin until age 19, when we’d met. She was someone who believed in saving sex, if not for marriage, at least for a relationship with real love and commitment. She didn’t wait until marriage but we did later marriage (though, sadly, we divorced a few years later). And it’s worth noting that she hadn’t saved herself just in the technical sense — she hadn’t gone past kissing and was a virgin by any conceivable (no pun intended) standard.

And yet even she was shocked by the shame that was hung around Monica’s neck and the modern day scarlet letter quality of it all. She commented about how unfair it seemed, that everyone is sexual, that everyone does the sort of things that she was pilloried for. The endless talk of the cigar, the blue dress — we both found it deplorable.

One could say the shaming was for being with a married man except for the fact that that would be obvious bullshit. The shaming was because Clinton was a Democrat. Half the people throwing stones had mistresses in the shadows and, over the next few years, it seemed that the other half were closeted gays demagoguing that issue too. The whole thing was a sad spectacle, a sign of how our politics had gone off track — and a 26 year old woman bore the brunt of it with no defenders on the left or the right. Even Clinton called her “that woman.”

Though I’d already long ago lost respect for Clinton, that comment confirmed what a hack he was, albeit brilliant and charismatic. Mind you, it wasn’t the affair itself that caused me to lose what little respect I still had for him; it was the way he threw his intern cum lover under the bus.
- JLHolsinger on June 25, 2015 at 5:16 pm
  
  Bothered me far more than the Republicans who did. As for why it bothered me, the hypocrisy. If it had been the President of Exxon fooling around with an younger intern there would be many on the left who would immediately jump to sexual harassment because of the power imbalance between the two parties and there would be some merit to that argument.
  
  To me Clinton/Lewinsky was that power imbalance on steroids. Sure she may have been pursuing him but he is the one who should have known that there were workplace issues with his choice to reciprocate.
  
  I honestly will never understand why people defend his actions in regards to her. You can think Starr took things too far and also believe Clinton was totally wrong in his actions.
  - Marie3 on June 25, 2015 at 9:09 pm
    
    It’s a slippery slope if others have to consider the power imbalance between two consenting adults to evaluate the appropriateness of a relationship. Absent a workplace prohibition on consenual sexual relationships between co-workers, which doesn’t exist hardly anywhere these days, the only aspect of the Lewinsky-Clinton relationship that made it inappropriate is that he was married. Had he been single, tongues may have wagged but nothing more.
    
    Democrats that blamed and trashed Lewinsky were wrong. Republicans that impeached Clinton over an affair were wrong.
    
    Personally, I wish they’d all just go away because I don’t want to be represented in the public sphere by liars and cheaters and their enablers.
SiDC on June 25, 2015 at 4:06 pm

Humans are assholes and prone to mobs in general. You can’t control that. What you can control is who the mob is after and who they will burn at the stake.

You want to save a victim? Offer the mob another victim to burn at the stake. But someone is going to get ruined, that is the internet, and you cannot change it.
Neildsmith on June 25, 2015 at 8:27 pm

OK let’s try. First, turn off your internet. Really… we all know that’s all it would take. It might not solve all the problems in the world, but at least you wouldn’t know it and none of us would be subjected to all this so-called bullying. I’ve been called more nasty things by people I don’t know than I ever imagined possible, but none of it has gotten bad because I don’t use twitter or facebook.

Turn off the internet.

Monica Lewinsky’s Ted Talk

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