On justice and pedophilia – Amy Davidson Sorkin in The New Yorker:

‘Just before the Senate Judiciary Committee voted, this week, on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court—one of the final hurdles before her confirmation by the full Senate, on Thursday—Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, offered a personal reminiscence from the hearings. “I got an opportunity during one of the breaks to go up to her parents, and I told them that they clearly raised her right,” Tillis said. “They should be very proud.” Then he voted against her, after a multiday spectacle during which Republican senators portrayed Jackson as a “dangerous” judge engaged in an extremist mission to undermine public safety on behalf of child-sex offenders, terrorists, and shadowy moneyed figures on the far left. Indeed, Tillis’s admiration for parents who had reared such a purported threat to the Republic would be befuddling if the falsity of the attacks against her were not so evident. The real mystery is why the senator thought that he had the standing to offer Jackson’s parents anything other than an apology.’

(…)

‘In attempting to slander her, Republican senators may also have done damage in the broader area of criminal-justice reform, dismissing all notions of judicial discretion and proportionality, let alone rehabilitation. At times, they seemed more like a focus group testing Democrats-are-soft-on-crime campaign ads than like legislators providing advice or consent. At one point, Ted Cruz suggested that supporting Jackson was comparable to calling for the police to be abolished.
If some senators, such as Cruz and Josh Hawley, seemed especially eager to enmesh themselves in conspiracy theories (the concept that the Democratic Party is one big child-trafficking ring is a QAnon tenet), the attacks were a group effort. The hearings further erased the distinction between senior Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, such as Chuck Grassley, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said that the three G.O.P. senators who voted to confirm Jackson—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitt Romney—were “pro-pedophile.”’

(…)

‘Some senators used the hearings to practice other electoral gambits, including those related to gender identity, a topic currently providing campaign fodder for Republicans such as Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Jackson to define “woman.” After the judge demurred—a reasonable move, given the biological and legal complexities—Blackburn and her colleagues practically exulted. Cruz asked Jackson how she could possibly rule on cases involving gender if she couldn’t “determine what a woman was.” “Senator, I know that I am a woman,” Jackson told him. “I know that Senator Blackburn is a woman. And the woman I admire most in the world is in the room today—my mother.”’

Read the article here.

It’s hard to tell what’s the difference between hysteria and an electoral strategy. Where the words ‘pedophile’ or pedophilia’ have been uttered hysteria is not far away, not to mention paranoia.
Once upon a time the question was, who is a Jew?

Now the question seems to be, what’s a woman?

No inclusion, without exclusion.

If you read the article, you will find some nice remarks about torture as well.
Which might give you a hint of the definition of torture. Torture is what the enemy does to us, what we do to them is therapy.