That's the crux of the entire argument. Is it a human being because it's a genetically distinct member of the human species? If no, it must become a human being eventually. When do the changes occur that makes a fetus into a human being?
Some say third trimester, formation of neocortex, thus assumed experience of pain. We assume that experiencing pain makes something human--or rather we assume that experiencing pain is equivalent to being a human being. But is it capable of having a sense of self? A sense of HUMAN self? Is it really an individual, or a blank stock OS with no custom software installed?
I have no empathy for newborns because there is no life experience, thus there is some coding for emotions but no experience on how to apply them. It might reflex to pain and demand food, because the body knows it will die if injured or starved and so it attempts to execute a rudimentary main loop to keep from dying. A potato bug does the same thing but they're hardly sentient, much less human. Plenty of AI do the same thing too, in like 300 lines of code or less (the AI have trouble where if you remove a leg they just walk in a circle).
Others believe that once it can experience pain, it can experience trauma, and emotions, and thus is a person. When the hell does THAT happen?
No, person inside your body is person inside your jurisdiction. You claimed that the person is wholly inside another person's body, and thus that all arguments about "personhood" are invalid. In other words, even if you assume that the fetus is a person, the mother has a right to kill it because it's inside her body. Essentially, because the fetus is inside the mother's jurisdiction (her own body), she can murder it?
The only argument that makes sense is over if and subsequently when a fetus becomes a human being with rights. If it's a human being with rights, you can't kill it just because it happens to be inside your body any more than you can kill any random person who happens to be inside your house (said person has to be a hostile invader of some kind; a fetus would most likely count as an innocent third party due to lack of criminal or hostile intent).
Murder is not justifiable because a person is within your jurisdiction; if you want it to not be murder, declare that the damn thing isn't a person.
No, but it does make you completely ignorant of what a 'double standard' implies. The fact that women and men are viewed differently has no bearing on how you're viewed; that's more a function of a stereotype--and an accurate one from general behavioral patterns. Your being anomalous by definition means that a significant majority of people fall within a certain level of intensity of the assumed behavior (sure, some men cheat constantly and don't care about anything but getting laid; others are all over getting some sex but treat women like people and are generally nice, if still sexual), and you fall outside of that distribution. You're actually outside the 4th standard deviation if you're completely asexual, which is pretty fucking rare--a handful of people on the planet at any given time.
That makes most typical assumptions quite justified, unlike Virgin and British Airways assuming every man is probably a vicious pedophile whereas that's actually a minority population.
And what about spending years telling people, before entering a traumatic situation, that those situations are nightmarish and life-destroying and horrible and cause endless trauma, to the point that the mind rationalizes it away as something that just happens to other people and not them; then one day dumping that situation on them? How does that affect the development of PTSD, once you've drilled in an underlying, subconscious fear and a horrible expectation through years of conditioning, while leaving the expectation that such situations simply don't happen to normal people and probably won't happen to them?
Most of the girls I've known have been raped at one point or another. There was the cute 18 year old that got raped--twice--by a security guard at work (and her manager tried to save face by just suspending him for 2 weeks with pay and telling her it'd been dealt with and to quiet down); the first girl I got head from told me a story about her boyfriend she had when she was 15, she broke up with him and he decided a baby would fix all their problems... rape and a miscarriage a few months in; another girl I met that was real nice, had her own martial arts dojo (I forget which art) and like 7dan black belt she got in 4 years after some guy raped her... the list goes on. All these people stuck it out and all of them got stronger for it; they all said it was bad and they cried at the time and it was scary and terrible but they lived. One of them became a counselor so she can tell other people that their life problems aren't terrible and life is better now than it was then.
The earth is definitely closer to 5 billion years old. Now, it may be 4.7 billion or 4.1 billion or 6.2 billion. Our measures point it closer to one number or another, though they could be wrong, and they're not very precise. Though the people that believe the earth is 6000 years old are probably right about this Jesus fellow; they may be wrong about him being able to heal people at a touch, but there probably was such a person. There was definitely a Roman empire.
On what day in the third trimester does a fetus develop a functioning neocortex, and at what point does that function evolve from having the ability to signal process into being a person? Also you seem to be basing your ideals of what is a person on when they are able to experience pain; I'm more of the sort that a person is a person when they've developed personality (i.e. when experiences start to form a sense of 'self'), and besides there is a hell of a lot of neural activity throughout the body (in the intestine, in the spine, etc) that makes a lot of decisions and reactions on pain and food and the like. Mind you not the experience of pain or hunger, but the reflexes and reactions and even shifting of hormones in the body is decided in various places rather than just the brain.
You're mistaken. You're not a part of a double standard; you're a part of neither. If we treated men and women the same--if they WERE the same--you'd still be an anomaly.
It's a clump of cells. It may have a clump of brain cells, but is the brain even viable? Can it support a personality or just function at that stage? And when it switches from "clump of neural cells" to "functioning human being finished the boot sequence" how do you tell and say "this is now a person"? It's all a bunch of fuzzy, imaginary magic--we want to believe there's a line somewhere, but even if we had an idea of where it is we wouldn't know it when we crossed it.
All that doesn't really much matter when you've defined the fetus as a human being with rights. That's why the core of the argument is always some kind of "personhood": while your morality and your logic and your other funny ideals might sound pretty good, they don't mean jack shit and the government should stay the fuck out of it. When it comes down to murder, we can't have that; do we believe this thing is a person or a clump of biological material? If it's a clump of biological material, we can kill it without "murdering" it. If it's a person, it has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and thus abortion is murder.
The rights of the mother do not trump murder; the moral opinions of governments do not trump individual liberty. If you want to make abortion illegal, you have to argue that the fetus is a person and thus abortion is murder; if you can't do that, then fuck off and don't legislate your beliefs at me.
The argument about defining the measure of a person is relevant, and the only argument of any concrete relevance. Abortions being a routine thing would definitely have a social impact, potentially a negative one (more sex without condoms spreading disease, more expensive abortions draining the economy and taking up doctors' times, etc); but is it really the matter of lawmakers to police this? Female autonomy is nice, until you ask if that includes the right to murder someone for being inconvenient; at this point you have to justify that an abortion isn't murder, which becomes more difficult the further into term you go--difficult, because the bit flip from "not person" to "person" isn't easy to detect even if you could precisely define it.
It really is a messy argument. It doesn't help that murdering a pregnant woman is basically counted as two murders, which is insane--make abortion illegal or make murdering a pregnant woman a single homicide.
Person is inside of your jurisdiction so you can murder them? That's the argument I just got. Any person in my house can be shot in the face.
Seriously. The argument that there is "another individual entirely within the body of a full-grown human being" has very little bearing on whether or not you can kill said individual. If we agree that said individual is indeed a person, with rights, and that being inside that body for a limited time is the only way for said person to survive, then it is absolutely insane to attempt some warped justification of killing them. The only sane argument is that the damn thing isn't actually a person yet.
Perhaps, when other people have invested in you emotionally as a person, rather than as "life"? When you're specifically a different person than any other person that could be? As a one-way state, mind. Once your parents can talk about your personality, you're a person. I guess that's it then: your personality is confirmed when you have personality. If you're born a vegetable and have no personality, you're not a person.
I'm sure you could have reported it immediately if she got you off, got a police report, immediately went on record disowning the child if she didn't take a morning after or have an abortion should pregnancy occur, and take it in court and win if it happened. A hassle, and you did your due throwing her off, but really--did you chuck her off to avoid psycho-bitch-baby and alimony, or because you really didn't want to nail her brains out? Hell, assuming psycho-bitch-baby was a definite no-go, would you have really cared if she rode you into the sunset, or would you have just thrown her out of your apartment when she finished, then changed the locks, because fuck not even worth the hassle to wrestle with this crazy bitch?
Personally, I'd be more upset that she's IN MY FUCKING HOUSE when I threw her out. I'm not blaming you for her actions, but god damn man, I would have changed the locks. The keys are unknown! She could have made copies, she could have given them to her friends! PEOPLE could show up in MY HOUSE that don't belong there! This isn't a "crazy bitch rode my cock" thing; this is a "how do I know my locked door is really locked?" thing. It's not really a locked door if someone who is no longer a trusted party has a key.
The double-standard is fair. Men and women are both different. They both posture in different ways. Men posture by being brutal and uncaring; women posture by being socially cohesive. That's an extreme oversimplification, but it's close enough for a non-scholarly discussion. Really, when men get talking it's all, "Oh I fucked X and Y and Z and this fucker was messin' with my girl I punched him in the mouth" back and forth. Women get together and they're all like... group therapy time, let's listen to each other's problems, or gossip and nod all the fucking time because agree agree agree we're friends!
Even tomboys aren't very butch and don't act very manly. They're clearly women in behavior, even if they have "masculine" hobbies instead of dolls. The girlish behavior enables social cohesion with other girls and attraction with guys, although men are generally attracted to vulnerability and pain for varying reasons (control mostly--though in some cases it's because they want to protect and help, in other cases it's because they need to possess and control) and women are attracted to strength and control (in some cases because they like being controlled, more generally though because a man with strength and control is able to keep others' aggression at bay by means of social control or by main force--this is extremely desirable when you're both a woman and not a tomboy trained in 27 forms of martial arts, and besides women in general like having a man that can protect their offspring).
Again, oversimplification, but close enough to make a point.
The impacts of alcohol are going to be quite different for both. The impacts of various social situations are going to be quite different for both. That isn't to say that men can't be raped by women; it is, however, much more likely for a man to be sexually predatory--this isn't a bad thing, men are always looking for sex partners, if you're searching for WILLING sex partners that's still predatory but PERFECTLY acceptable. As such, it's also more likely that a man is going to be like, "Sweet, got laid!" whereas a woman would be indifferent. Men like to brag about how many times they got laid; women are more prone to wake up with a hot guy and be like, "Oh... well, he's hot, holy shit is THAT his penis WOW!!!!" or be like "... oh. Whatever." Every lay is a win for an average (mode) guy, for a girl it's a factor of if she was horny and wanted it and is satisfied OR if the next day she decides "he was pretty cool" or whatever.
Which of course means, face it, girls are less likely to go home with you sober than drunk, by a large degree. Guys are more likely to bang any cute girl that propositions them.
Still. Don't drink that much alcohol. Don't bone drunk girls unless you have strong reason to believe they're up for it anyway. If you know her and you fuck like all the time and the next day she complains it's like... well fuck, sorry. Not great, but it's understandable. If you know her or just met her or otherwise you do NOT fuck and she's smashed and you fuck her and she's pissed the next day... see, that's a problem, you shouldn't have gone and done that.
The social environment is designed to convince women that the social ordeal is maximally terrible. A rapist that doesn't inflict any severe psychological trauma can go to jail for 2-3 years at most. Show psychological trauma and you can TRIPLE the sentence. Every prosecutor wants to be a hero, to get a conviction for 3 counts of rape and throw people in jail for 30 years and get those "monsters" off the streets. That means every prosecutor WANTS to see women hurt, want them to show trauma; when they don't, they get counseling that pokes and prods and asks questions for hours "to help them talk about it" because obviously if a woman is okay after being raped she must feel so horrible that she feels she needs to cover it up.
Often times that exact coaxing helps change their perception and make them feel horrible. I mean how is a woman not supposed to feel terrible after a rape? I bet she liked it.
I think there's a fundamental difference between being beat up and having an orifice or two violated for the sexual gratification of someone else. If you have personally experienced the latter, you might have justification for speaking the way you do.
How so? When I was a child, people used to beat me for their personal gratification. It stopped being a problem for me in middle school, when I realized I was actually pretty fucking resillient. At 80 pounds, some 280 pound monster in my class decided for his own amusement he'd slam me into a couple walls and the corner of a door... no bruises, broken bones, after the beating I got up and laughed at him and wandered away. He looked... terrified. Never fucked with me again. Guess it killed his hard-on.
I can tell you that repeated beatings teaches you not to ride your bike down a certain street; and that constant taunting until around 10th grade teaches you to not do ANYTHING to draw attention to yourself, EVER. Eventually my anti-social isolationist personality gave me the edge to observe and notice that the most socially successful people are outgoing and do a lot of stupid shit, but just shrug it off when they call it wrong and everyone thinks they're retarded. Make a joke, strike a pose, make a pass at a girl and get rejected... and just shrug, smile, and say something dumb and self-deprecating, then continue on (maybe a little more conservative) and in two minutes nobody will care.
People didn't taunt me because I did stupid shit. They taunted me because it entertained them. They had a target, they had a way to show off to their friends, to attack somebody else and draw everyone else into it. It created a crowd, a kinship: everyone hate on the quiet kid, he's harmless and it's fun to be a dick to him. This was never my fault.
How is getting raped any different? People stealing my shit, beating me, turning everyone against me... why not stick a few things in a few places too? In the end it comes down to the same shit: I should have punched every one of these fuckers in their mouths, repeatedly, until they learned to not be dicks. The moral high ground didn't work; laughing at stupid bullies works because I'm just that fucking strong, they can't hurt me, and it embarrasses them in front of their friends standing around. It's an attack, and it's injurious, and they back down. Sitting around quiet and walking off.. I've done that when punched, beaten, taunted, and people just laugh to themselves and call me names. Quip at them, maybe it'll hurt, maybe they'll try to shut you up with their fists... that works too, if they're going to bring their fists I'll bring MY fists and we can see who limps away.
The ones that did get punched were done in one. Nobody came back from that. Too dangerous, they left me the fuck alone. Corey was spooked after I laughed off his assault but he tried again a whole damn YEAR later and I put him on the ground and kept him there until I was damn well done showing that I had irrefutable power over his giant ass. Could have smashed that boy's skull to a pulp at any time and he was still 3 times bigger than me, and he kept trying to throw me off for 2 minutes. Never touched me again... guess he hated being that helpless in front of 40 people and 2 gym teachers (gym teachers don't do shit, they just shout at you while smiling inside).
This breaks down to a degree for rape. By its nature it is infrequently observed by witnesses.
Back in the day witnesses would beat the shit out of you. Nowadays we like to think they're cowards and won't call the cops so they don't have to get involved (multiple people were accused of doing this in the Sandrusky case).
I saw a bunch of people across the street cheering the other day on my way home from the bar. Turned and saw a guy beating on some girl, apparently that was the totally awesome thing that was happening. Went to intervene (yeah he was 3 times bigger than me but what the fuck else can I do?) but several of his friends showed up and dragged him away by main force, so I tailed them for a bit until he cooled off and then let the situation resolve itself. Here I was hopin' I'd get to boot some head, too.
In a real world scenario, a rape with witnesses is going to have a lot of cheering, masturbating witnesses. In fact, when I read The Gap Cycle, there was a part where one character attacks a woman in front of a whole bunch of other guys because he demanded sex and she told him no; in short order people were cheering and shouting things like "Yeah fuck that whore!" I think that's actually a pretty realistic description of how a rape with witnesses would play out.
The problem is that severe emotional trauma upsets the hormonal balance of a woman's body, which can make it harder for a fertilized egg to implant. The body may fail to recognize the pregnancy--or rather, the stress reactions may lead the body to react such as is appropriate if the woman has not found a consistently safe and secure nesting site--and then eject the fertilized egg via menstruation.
This fact raises the question: is rape enough to trigger said reaction? We don't need to really answer the question; all we need to do is pull up statistics and show that, no, you don't really see fewer rape pregnancies than you do pregnancies from single-encounter intercourse as a whole. The female body may indeed react, yet usually react not quite strongly enough to cause an automatic abortion (miscarriage). In such a case, you could show the reaction to substantiate the claim that, yes, the female body "has ways" to shut all that down; yet the statistics would show that typically a single encounter rape isn't enough to kick the system into full swing and thus the chances of pregnancy aren't actually decreased in real-world scenarios. Without the statistics, showing the physical reaction could be highly misleading: it would give the implication that some possibly significant portion of rapes are actually hardened against pregnancy--with substantiating evidence--when this is simply not true.
That's what makes statistics really excellent: although you can apply it incorrectly to mislead the public, as a statistician you can apply physics soundly and show that, although you have no real understanding of why, you're definitely sure things work a certain way.
If I were legal council to the two 15 year olds, I would advise them to not bother trying to defend themselves and just turn it into a farce. In front of a judge, not a jury. Each could use the same defense: this is a clear case of rape and THEY ARE THE VICTIM. The girl's defense is that she was being raped by the boy; the boy's defense is that he was being raped by the girl. Let the judge what the fuck on that one as both disclaim liability for rape by claiming it was the other person forcing themselves on them IN THE SAME ACT. Can't turn out any worse than just getting convicted anyway.
The debate is actually over whether it's a harmful medical procedure performed on the fetus. Basically one group sees the woman as a caregiver who has by her actions taken over care of another individual currently incapacitated from caring for themselves, and doesn't believe a woman should be allowed to casually withdraw care given that it is 100% likely to lead to the death of said individual. The other group says if an individual hasn't been seen yet, it doesn't exist, and thus executing said individual is fine and not murder.
Both groups are really kind of strange. For example, the second group generally doesn't function as stated verbatim, but rather believes that at some arbitrary time the unseen individual is suddenly real (like, second, third trimester, a specific number of days into pregnancy), just a magic but arbitrary switch that has nothing to do with physical development; the other group believes the same thing, but the thing suddenly becomes an individual earlier. I don't believe newborn babies are any different than a fetus: they're blank and have no individuality, and a one-day-old is pretty worthless and not really a human being but just a collection of cells.
I'm rather certain that horses don't give a shit or if they do you'll know. Damn things weigh like 2000 pounds and will kick you like a fucking cannon. Besides that a horse can just flop over on you or reduce your bones to pulp, if a horse busts a nut I really don't think it CARES how it unloaded; it's a damn animal.
The problem is you drank too much alcohol. This is why I don't drink that much alcohol and why I go pining at women before they've had more than maybe one drink, and that's edgy for me. I VOMIT before I lose my sense of reasoning (alcohol mainly affects me physically, but also even small amounts of alcohol basically stabilize my emotions and prevent clinical depression), and that takes...what... 3 or 4 beers, plus 4 ounces of whiskey, and an ounce or two of rum in an hour on an empty stomach? I did it once for an experiment.
That's great, but I don't trust women to be rational if the LIGHTING is different, much less if they've had ANY alcohol. Women are emotionally unstable, you can get them to do ANYTHING with the right shift in just about any social factor--lighting, temperature, whether or not they're hungry, boredom and recent excitement, the tone of your voice, facial expression, the presence or lack of presence of people, presence of cameras, etc. Alcohol is a quick motivator, it changes their perception on a subconscious level (alcohol = fun = be fun) and on a physical level (it's alcohol). At the end of the night after a dozen Jaeger bombs I don't think a girl has her head screwed on straight AT ALL.
If she doesn't say outright "hey whatever happens" or "yeah fuck me at the end of the night" when she's sober, not doing that. As for me, I'll have a couple good beers or throw an ounce of whiskey or brandy (Christian Brothers VS) in a sniffer and carry that for 4-6 hours. I don't need to pound shots that taste like piss, what the hell is the point of that? (Though jaeger bombs are oddly tasty... must be all the spices in jaeger, I should look into that).
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That's the crux of the entire argument. Is it a human being because it's a genetically distinct member of the human species? If no, it must become a human being eventually. When do the changes occur that makes a fetus into a human being?
Some say third trimester, formation of neocortex, thus assumed experience of pain. We assume that experiencing pain makes something human--or rather we assume that experiencing pain is equivalent to being a human being. But is it capable of having a sense of self? A sense of HUMAN self? Is it really an individual, or a blank stock OS with no custom software installed?
I have no empathy for newborns because there is no life experience, thus there is some coding for emotions but no experience on how to apply them. It might reflex to pain and demand food, because the body knows it will die if injured or starved and so it attempts to execute a rudimentary main loop to keep from dying. A potato bug does the same thing but they're hardly sentient, much less human. Plenty of AI do the same thing too, in like 300 lines of code or less (the AI have trouble where if you remove a leg they just walk in a circle).
Others believe that once it can experience pain, it can experience trauma, and emotions, and thus is a person. When the hell does THAT happen?
None of it is easy to pin down.
No, person inside your body is person inside your jurisdiction. You claimed that the person is wholly inside another person's body, and thus that all arguments about "personhood" are invalid. In other words, even if you assume that the fetus is a person, the mother has a right to kill it because it's inside her body. Essentially, because the fetus is inside the mother's jurisdiction (her own body), she can murder it?
The only argument that makes sense is over if and subsequently when a fetus becomes a human being with rights. If it's a human being with rights, you can't kill it just because it happens to be inside your body any more than you can kill any random person who happens to be inside your house (said person has to be a hostile invader of some kind; a fetus would most likely count as an innocent third party due to lack of criminal or hostile intent).
Murder is not justifiable because a person is within your jurisdiction; if you want it to not be murder, declare that the damn thing isn't a person.
Criminal intent. I think they don't has it.
No, but it does make you completely ignorant of what a 'double standard' implies. The fact that women and men are viewed differently has no bearing on how you're viewed; that's more a function of a stereotype--and an accurate one from general behavioral patterns. Your being anomalous by definition means that a significant majority of people fall within a certain level of intensity of the assumed behavior (sure, some men cheat constantly and don't care about anything but getting laid; others are all over getting some sex but treat women like people and are generally nice, if still sexual), and you fall outside of that distribution. You're actually outside the 4th standard deviation if you're completely asexual, which is pretty fucking rare--a handful of people on the planet at any given time.
That makes most typical assumptions quite justified, unlike Virgin and British Airways assuming every man is probably a vicious pedophile whereas that's actually a minority population.
And what about spending years telling people, before entering a traumatic situation, that those situations are nightmarish and life-destroying and horrible and cause endless trauma, to the point that the mind rationalizes it away as something that just happens to other people and not them; then one day dumping that situation on them? How does that affect the development of PTSD, once you've drilled in an underlying, subconscious fear and a horrible expectation through years of conditioning, while leaving the expectation that such situations simply don't happen to normal people and probably won't happen to them?
Most of the girls I've known have been raped at one point or another. There was the cute 18 year old that got raped--twice--by a security guard at work (and her manager tried to save face by just suspending him for 2 weeks with pay and telling her it'd been dealt with and to quiet down); the first girl I got head from told me a story about her boyfriend she had when she was 15, she broke up with him and he decided a baby would fix all their problems ... rape and a miscarriage a few months in; another girl I met that was real nice, had her own martial arts dojo (I forget which art) and like 7dan black belt she got in 4 years after some guy raped her... the list goes on. All these people stuck it out and all of them got stronger for it; they all said it was bad and they cried at the time and it was scary and terrible but they lived. One of them became a counselor so she can tell other people that their life problems aren't terrible and life is better now than it was then.
The earth is definitely closer to 5 billion years old. Now, it may be 4.7 billion or 4.1 billion or 6.2 billion. Our measures point it closer to one number or another, though they could be wrong, and they're not very precise. Though the people that believe the earth is 6000 years old are probably right about this Jesus fellow; they may be wrong about him being able to heal people at a touch, but there probably was such a person. There was definitely a Roman empire.
On what day in the third trimester does a fetus develop a functioning neocortex, and at what point does that function evolve from having the ability to signal process into being a person? Also you seem to be basing your ideals of what is a person on when they are able to experience pain; I'm more of the sort that a person is a person when they've developed personality (i.e. when experiences start to form a sense of 'self'), and besides there is a hell of a lot of neural activity throughout the body (in the intestine, in the spine, etc) that makes a lot of decisions and reactions on pain and food and the like. Mind you not the experience of pain or hunger, but the reflexes and reactions and even shifting of hormones in the body is decided in various places rather than just the brain.
You're mistaken. You're not a part of a double standard; you're a part of neither. If we treated men and women the same--if they WERE the same--you'd still be an anomaly.
It's a clump of cells. It may have a clump of brain cells, but is the brain even viable? Can it support a personality or just function at that stage? And when it switches from "clump of neural cells" to "functioning human being finished the boot sequence" how do you tell and say "this is now a person"? It's all a bunch of fuzzy, imaginary magic--we want to believe there's a line somewhere, but even if we had an idea of where it is we wouldn't know it when we crossed it.
All that doesn't really much matter when you've defined the fetus as a human being with rights. That's why the core of the argument is always some kind of "personhood": while your morality and your logic and your other funny ideals might sound pretty good, they don't mean jack shit and the government should stay the fuck out of it. When it comes down to murder, we can't have that; do we believe this thing is a person or a clump of biological material? If it's a clump of biological material, we can kill it without "murdering" it. If it's a person, it has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and thus abortion is murder.
The rights of the mother do not trump murder; the moral opinions of governments do not trump individual liberty. If you want to make abortion illegal, you have to argue that the fetus is a person and thus abortion is murder; if you can't do that, then fuck off and don't legislate your beliefs at me.
The argument about defining the measure of a person is relevant, and the only argument of any concrete relevance. Abortions being a routine thing would definitely have a social impact, potentially a negative one (more sex without condoms spreading disease, more expensive abortions draining the economy and taking up doctors' times, etc); but is it really the matter of lawmakers to police this? Female autonomy is nice, until you ask if that includes the right to murder someone for being inconvenient; at this point you have to justify that an abortion isn't murder, which becomes more difficult the further into term you go--difficult, because the bit flip from "not person" to "person" isn't easy to detect even if you could precisely define it.
It really is a messy argument. It doesn't help that murdering a pregnant woman is basically counted as two murders, which is insane--make abortion illegal or make murdering a pregnant woman a single homicide.
Person is inside of your jurisdiction so you can murder them? That's the argument I just got. Any person in my house can be shot in the face.
Seriously. The argument that there is "another individual entirely within the body of a full-grown human being" has very little bearing on whether or not you can kill said individual. If we agree that said individual is indeed a person, with rights, and that being inside that body for a limited time is the only way for said person to survive, then it is absolutely insane to attempt some warped justification of killing them. The only sane argument is that the damn thing isn't actually a person yet.
Humans see patterns where there are none. Babies are instinctive and take actions like kicking, crying, etc.
I don't weigh 2000 pounds and I can't kick like a tank shell.
Perhaps, when other people have invested in you emotionally as a person, rather than as "life"? When you're specifically a different person than any other person that could be? As a one-way state, mind. Once your parents can talk about your personality, you're a person. I guess that's it then: your personality is confirmed when you have personality. If you're born a vegetable and have no personality, you're not a person.
I'm sure you could have reported it immediately if she got you off, got a police report, immediately went on record disowning the child if she didn't take a morning after or have an abortion should pregnancy occur, and take it in court and win if it happened. A hassle, and you did your due throwing her off, but really--did you chuck her off to avoid psycho-bitch-baby and alimony, or because you really didn't want to nail her brains out? Hell, assuming psycho-bitch-baby was a definite no-go, would you have really cared if she rode you into the sunset, or would you have just thrown her out of your apartment when she finished, then changed the locks, because fuck not even worth the hassle to wrestle with this crazy bitch?
Personally, I'd be more upset that she's IN MY FUCKING HOUSE when I threw her out. I'm not blaming you for her actions, but god damn man, I would have changed the locks. The keys are unknown! She could have made copies, she could have given them to her friends! PEOPLE could show up in MY HOUSE that don't belong there! This isn't a "crazy bitch rode my cock" thing; this is a "how do I know my locked door is really locked?" thing. It's not really a locked door if someone who is no longer a trusted party has a key.
The double-standard is fair. Men and women are both different. They both posture in different ways. Men posture by being brutal and uncaring; women posture by being socially cohesive. That's an extreme oversimplification, but it's close enough for a non-scholarly discussion. Really, when men get talking it's all, "Oh I fucked X and Y and Z and this fucker was messin' with my girl I punched him in the mouth" back and forth. Women get together and they're all like... group therapy time, let's listen to each other's problems, or gossip and nod all the fucking time because agree agree agree we're friends!
Even tomboys aren't very butch and don't act very manly. They're clearly women in behavior, even if they have "masculine" hobbies instead of dolls. The girlish behavior enables social cohesion with other girls and attraction with guys, although men are generally attracted to vulnerability and pain for varying reasons (control mostly--though in some cases it's because they want to protect and help, in other cases it's because they need to possess and control) and women are attracted to strength and control (in some cases because they like being controlled, more generally though because a man with strength and control is able to keep others' aggression at bay by means of social control or by main force--this is extremely desirable when you're both a woman and not a tomboy trained in 27 forms of martial arts, and besides women in general like having a man that can protect their offspring).
Again, oversimplification, but close enough to make a point.
The impacts of alcohol are going to be quite different for both. The impacts of various social situations are going to be quite different for both. That isn't to say that men can't be raped by women; it is, however, much more likely for a man to be sexually predatory--this isn't a bad thing, men are always looking for sex partners, if you're searching for WILLING sex partners that's still predatory but PERFECTLY acceptable. As such, it's also more likely that a man is going to be like, "Sweet, got laid!" whereas a woman would be indifferent. Men like to brag about how many times they got laid; women are more prone to wake up with a hot guy and be like, "Oh ... well, he's hot, holy shit is THAT his penis WOW!!!!" or be like "... oh. Whatever." Every lay is a win for an average (mode) guy, for a girl it's a factor of if she was horny and wanted it and is satisfied OR if the next day she decides "he was pretty cool" or whatever.
Which of course means, face it, girls are less likely to go home with you sober than drunk, by a large degree. Guys are more likely to bang any cute girl that propositions them.
Still. Don't drink that much alcohol. Don't bone drunk girls unless you have strong reason to believe they're up for it anyway. If you know her and you fuck like all the time and the next day she complains it's like ... well fuck, sorry. Not great, but it's understandable. If you know her or just met her or otherwise you do NOT fuck and she's smashed and you fuck her and she's pissed the next day ... see, that's a problem, you shouldn't have gone and done that.
The social environment is designed to convince women that the social ordeal is maximally terrible. A rapist that doesn't inflict any severe psychological trauma can go to jail for 2-3 years at most. Show psychological trauma and you can TRIPLE the sentence. Every prosecutor wants to be a hero, to get a conviction for 3 counts of rape and throw people in jail for 30 years and get those "monsters" off the streets. That means every prosecutor WANTS to see women hurt, want them to show trauma; when they don't, they get counseling that pokes and prods and asks questions for hours "to help them talk about it" because obviously if a woman is okay after being raped she must feel so horrible that she feels she needs to cover it up.
Often times that exact coaxing helps change their perception and make them feel horrible. I mean how is a woman not supposed to feel terrible after a rape? I bet she liked it.
That whore.
I think there's a fundamental difference between being beat up and having an orifice or two violated for the sexual gratification of someone else. If you have personally experienced the latter, you might have justification for speaking the way you do.
How so? When I was a child, people used to beat me for their personal gratification. It stopped being a problem for me in middle school, when I realized I was actually pretty fucking resillient. At 80 pounds, some 280 pound monster in my class decided for his own amusement he'd slam me into a couple walls and the corner of a door... no bruises, broken bones, after the beating I got up and laughed at him and wandered away. He looked ... terrified. Never fucked with me again. Guess it killed his hard-on.
I can tell you that repeated beatings teaches you not to ride your bike down a certain street; and that constant taunting until around 10th grade teaches you to not do ANYTHING to draw attention to yourself, EVER. Eventually my anti-social isolationist personality gave me the edge to observe and notice that the most socially successful people are outgoing and do a lot of stupid shit, but just shrug it off when they call it wrong and everyone thinks they're retarded. Make a joke, strike a pose, make a pass at a girl and get rejected ... and just shrug, smile, and say something dumb and self-deprecating, then continue on (maybe a little more conservative) and in two minutes nobody will care.
People didn't taunt me because I did stupid shit. They taunted me because it entertained them. They had a target, they had a way to show off to their friends, to attack somebody else and draw everyone else into it. It created a crowd, a kinship: everyone hate on the quiet kid, he's harmless and it's fun to be a dick to him. This was never my fault.
How is getting raped any different? People stealing my shit, beating me, turning everyone against me... why not stick a few things in a few places too? In the end it comes down to the same shit: I should have punched every one of these fuckers in their mouths, repeatedly, until they learned to not be dicks. The moral high ground didn't work; laughing at stupid bullies works because I'm just that fucking strong, they can't hurt me, and it embarrasses them in front of their friends standing around. It's an attack, and it's injurious, and they back down. Sitting around quiet and walking off.. I've done that when punched, beaten, taunted, and people just laugh to themselves and call me names. Quip at them, maybe it'll hurt, maybe they'll try to shut you up with their fists... that works too, if they're going to bring their fists I'll bring MY fists and we can see who limps away.
The ones that did get punched were done in one. Nobody came back from that. Too dangerous, they left me the fuck alone. Corey was spooked after I laughed off his assault but he tried again a whole damn YEAR later and I put him on the ground and kept him there until I was damn well done showing that I had irrefutable power over his giant ass. Could have smashed that boy's skull to a pulp at any time and he was still 3 times bigger than me, and he kept trying to throw me off for 2 minutes. Never touched me again... guess he hated being that helpless in front of 40 people and 2 gym teachers (gym teachers don't do shit, they just shout at you while smiling inside).
This breaks down to a degree for rape. By its nature it is infrequently observed by witnesses.
Back in the day witnesses would beat the shit out of you. Nowadays we like to think they're cowards and won't call the cops so they don't have to get involved (multiple people were accused of doing this in the Sandrusky case).
I saw a bunch of people across the street cheering the other day on my way home from the bar. Turned and saw a guy beating on some girl, apparently that was the totally awesome thing that was happening. Went to intervene (yeah he was 3 times bigger than me but what the fuck else can I do?) but several of his friends showed up and dragged him away by main force, so I tailed them for a bit until he cooled off and then let the situation resolve itself. Here I was hopin' I'd get to boot some head, too.
In a real world scenario, a rape with witnesses is going to have a lot of cheering, masturbating witnesses. In fact, when I read The Gap Cycle, there was a part where one character attacks a woman in front of a whole bunch of other guys because he demanded sex and she told him no; in short order people were cheering and shouting things like "Yeah fuck that whore!" I think that's actually a pretty realistic description of how a rape with witnesses would play out.
Worse than cowards.
The problem is that severe emotional trauma upsets the hormonal balance of a woman's body, which can make it harder for a fertilized egg to implant. The body may fail to recognize the pregnancy--or rather, the stress reactions may lead the body to react such as is appropriate if the woman has not found a consistently safe and secure nesting site--and then eject the fertilized egg via menstruation.
This fact raises the question: is rape enough to trigger said reaction? We don't need to really answer the question; all we need to do is pull up statistics and show that, no, you don't really see fewer rape pregnancies than you do pregnancies from single-encounter intercourse as a whole. The female body may indeed react, yet usually react not quite strongly enough to cause an automatic abortion (miscarriage). In such a case, you could show the reaction to substantiate the claim that, yes, the female body "has ways" to shut all that down; yet the statistics would show that typically a single encounter rape isn't enough to kick the system into full swing and thus the chances of pregnancy aren't actually decreased in real-world scenarios. Without the statistics, showing the physical reaction could be highly misleading: it would give the implication that some possibly significant portion of rapes are actually hardened against pregnancy--with substantiating evidence--when this is simply not true.
That's what makes statistics really excellent: although you can apply it incorrectly to mislead the public, as a statistician you can apply physics soundly and show that, although you have no real understanding of why, you're definitely sure things work a certain way.
If I were legal council to the two 15 year olds, I would advise them to not bother trying to defend themselves and just turn it into a farce. In front of a judge, not a jury. Each could use the same defense: this is a clear case of rape and THEY ARE THE VICTIM. The girl's defense is that she was being raped by the boy; the boy's defense is that he was being raped by the girl. Let the judge what the fuck on that one as both disclaim liability for rape by claiming it was the other person forcing themselves on them IN THE SAME ACT. Can't turn out any worse than just getting convicted anyway.
The debate is actually over whether it's a harmful medical procedure performed on the fetus. Basically one group sees the woman as a caregiver who has by her actions taken over care of another individual currently incapacitated from caring for themselves, and doesn't believe a woman should be allowed to casually withdraw care given that it is 100% likely to lead to the death of said individual. The other group says if an individual hasn't been seen yet, it doesn't exist, and thus executing said individual is fine and not murder.
Both groups are really kind of strange. For example, the second group generally doesn't function as stated verbatim, but rather believes that at some arbitrary time the unseen individual is suddenly real (like, second, third trimester, a specific number of days into pregnancy), just a magic but arbitrary switch that has nothing to do with physical development; the other group believes the same thing, but the thing suddenly becomes an individual earlier. I don't believe newborn babies are any different than a fetus: they're blank and have no individuality, and a one-day-old is pretty worthless and not really a human being but just a collection of cells.
Except that horses won't accuse anyone. I guess.
I'm rather certain that horses don't give a shit or if they do you'll know. Damn things weigh like 2000 pounds and will kick you like a fucking cannon. Besides that a horse can just flop over on you or reduce your bones to pulp, if a horse busts a nut I really don't think it CARES how it unloaded; it's a damn animal.
The problem is you drank too much alcohol. This is why I don't drink that much alcohol and why I go pining at women before they've had more than maybe one drink, and that's edgy for me. I VOMIT before I lose my sense of reasoning (alcohol mainly affects me physically, but also even small amounts of alcohol basically stabilize my emotions and prevent clinical depression), and that takes ...what ... 3 or 4 beers, plus 4 ounces of whiskey, and an ounce or two of rum in an hour on an empty stomach? I did it once for an experiment.
That's great, but I don't trust women to be rational if the LIGHTING is different, much less if they've had ANY alcohol. Women are emotionally unstable, you can get them to do ANYTHING with the right shift in just about any social factor--lighting, temperature, whether or not they're hungry, boredom and recent excitement, the tone of your voice, facial expression, the presence or lack of presence of people, presence of cameras, etc. Alcohol is a quick motivator, it changes their perception on a subconscious level (alcohol = fun = be fun) and on a physical level (it's alcohol). At the end of the night after a dozen Jaeger bombs I don't think a girl has her head screwed on straight AT ALL.
If she doesn't say outright "hey whatever happens" or "yeah fuck me at the end of the night" when she's sober, not doing that. As for me, I'll have a couple good beers or throw an ounce of whiskey or brandy (Christian Brothers VS) in a sniffer and carry that for 4-6 hours. I don't need to pound shots that taste like piss, what the hell is the point of that? (Though jaeger bombs are oddly tasty... must be all the spices in jaeger, I should look into that).
Which is all fair. When a moronic claim is made science is a good way to determine exactly how moronic it is.
Best quote.