Maybe I just imagined that my bazillionaire, sugar-mama friend had a secret weapon that makes her more successful than me…
New at Reason: One day Mariana Pasternak, Martha Stewart's layabout sponge of a best friend, hangs the defendant with a damning quote. Now Pasternak says the quote may actually have come from her own stream of consciousness. You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to figure this one out. Elizabeth Koch reports from the trial.
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Two quick thoughts:
1. There’s nothing the least bit odd about being doubtful about whether a phrase you associate with a year-old memory is a memory of a spoken phrase or a memory of something you thought at the time. Human memory is not a camcorder.
2. There’s nothing odd, either, about the fact that this came out on cross. Suppose you are 60% sure that you recall that X was something said to you as opposed to something you thought. An attorney bound and determined to get you to testify that X was said might ask on direct examination , “What’s your *best* recollection of what was said to you?” And you might say X because it’s what you’re most sure of. The smart defense attorney (or, in the case of Bob Morvillo, the genius defense attorney) notices the peculiar wording of the question and brings out the doubt on cross.
alkali,
You make valid points, but I don’t buy it. I have no idea who’s lying about what in this case, but the whole “She may have said that incriminating remark, or I may have just pulled it out of my ass. I can’t be sure” thing is way too amusing.
Um…how do I write this without looking like a misogynist? Even if I can write about this without looking like a misogynist, it’s a hard conept to describe.
Well, maybe it can’t be done, but here’s a try…
Questioning the sincerity of the witness is beside the point; in fact, because of the apparent inconsistency in this witness’ testimony, I tend to think she’s trying to tell the truth. But the truth is that she really CAN’T tell the difference between what she imagines people say and what they really say.
Actually, this sounds like about a hundred conversations I’ve had with various girlfriends over the years. Have any of you ever tried to pin a female down on a issue that they didn’t want to be pinned down on?
I’m telling you I’ve seen a lot of women do this. They can’t tell differentiate between what they want to happen and what really happened or what you’ve said versus what they want you to have said, especially if they’re angry.
They also can’t seem to keep track of when the football game is on and when it isn’t.
I hate soft rock (Bart says, “Crap rock!”), but it’s like the lyrics to Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman to Me”, I guess.
It’s the flip-side of Shultz’s Fourth Law of Social Dynamics which states, explicitly, that when women are confronted with mutually exclusive alternatives, they almost invariably choose both.
She’s been confronted with mutually exclusive alternate realities, and she chooses both.
Is she related to Boris? 🙂
CAn she blame this on estrogen loss?
shultz: i dunno, sounds like a lot of tardbunnies have ovaries hiding in their nads.
being wishywashy dreamland weapons of mass tardation is hardly a female trait – though there are probably more women than men who have the dumb doris syndrome, since they haven’t all died off yet.
I’d like to second the notion that being wishy-washy in a semi-fantasy world isn’t an exclusivly female trait. I had a roommate (male) a year ago that was the same way when you tried to pin him down on a subject. The answers he gave usually didn’t really jive with reality.
I think some people just live more in a fantasy world then do most of us. I’m not talking full blown dual-personality schizo either, just that they tend to pay so much attention to little details dreamed up soley in their minds that those details and reality tend to get mixed together. This trait just happens to pop up more in females.
You know, come to think of it he acted very much like a women at times. Makes me wonder… *shudder*
More to the point, should someone go to jail based on testimony like this?
For pete’s sake, most men and women live in worlds completely divorced from what I like to call “reality”. They keep doing the same things over and over, with the same results, and it doesn’t even occur to them one has anything at all to do with the other (my personal pet peeve) or just re-imagine the world to match their expectations (Shultz’s pet peeve). And it has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with– well, my natural misanthropy. Still. Try to pin anyone down on anything they don’t want to be pinned down on. Same result. Men. Women. A pox on both their houses.
Though, I will have to admit, people who majored in English seem to have a lock on the “Oh, the subtext of that statement was very insulting,” style of argument. Symbolism is no one’s friend.
ummm memory ain’t 100%
and its extremely hard to say “exactly” what you said earlier…
think bast to your first memories… do you actually remember them, or are they just imprinted because your parents/family told you stories about what you did and you’ve seen pictures? a great deal of clinical research has shown that people will make things up to fit what they believe is the real data… the power of suggestion is high, and the brain is wired to make inferences.
think of the number of times that you have hazy/non existant memories of a party… where were you dreaming, where were you awake, where did things pop in based on inferences or other people discussing the events?
now go back 2 years
what did you say, exactly, on the morning of december 15 2001? i don’t know “exactly” what my friend said september 11 discussing how freaked out he was and how he was going to his girlfriends place to get away from the planes that were presumed to be attempting to crash into la that day (when we thought there were many more hijacked planes unaccounted for). and thats one day that is really burned into my memories
what about any other day that only became important weeks later?
no dice
and mysoginist dude, you need to get your head out of your ***
If you give Shultz’s Fourth Law of Social Dynamics a second read, you’ll see that it doesn’t say that living in a, “…semi-fantasy world is an exclusively female trait.”
It’s more like…females seem to more attuned to…paradox. Now a real bozo female, like the one in question, could take this “attunement” and bozo it up, easily. But being “attuned to paradox”, for want of a better term, isn’t a negative thing per se.
And just to clear up the point, Shultz is no misogynist.
Indeed, Shultz’s First Law of Social Dynamics states explicitly that, “Jesus was right; people are sheep.” And that’s a transgender statement.
There is only one other Law which mentions women specificly, Shultz’s Second Law. It states, explicitly again, “Females control the begining and the end of every social relationship.”
But, unlike misogyny, Shultz’s Second Law isn’t even specific to Homo Sapiens.
So there.
When I “think of the number of times that you have hazy/non existant memories of a party…” that can usually be explained by my destroying the “3 beer rule.”
I dunno. In my experience, women are far better at dredging up your exact words from some conversation eight months ago that you thought was pretty trivial. And they seem to do it even better while they’re in an, shall we say, agitated state.