I played FFXI for a little over a year. It wasn't harder. Putting in XP penalties on death and caps on XP (making you have to chain to break the caps) doesn't actually up the difficulty, just the time it takes to get through.
I could literally play FFXI by looking at the screen once every 30 seconds or so. I'd watch TV or movies to keep the tedium down. I can't do that with WoW. I also die a lot more in WoW than I ever did in FFXI. This is because FFXI is not hard. Its very simple, and very rote. You do the same actions over and over in parties for hours on end, with little variation. What it is, is tedius. Most MMO players tend to confuse the two.
Well, unless they managed to change that in the last two expansions. I quite a while after Chains of Promathia.
If people just said that Eve is not for anyone, then people wouldn't have a problem. In general, though, I find Eve players to be arrogant and irritating:
If you don't like Eve, its because you're a moron. If you found it boring, then you didn't do it right or have ADD. Needless complexity is good because it weeds out the moron. Griefing is the ultimate form of entertainment, and if you don't like the idea of your hard work being blown up then you're a wussy carebare. WoW is a MMO on training wheels, and you're a drooling moron if you like it. Eve is obviously the best MMO out there, and if you disagree you're wrong or a dumbass teenager. Teenagers play WoW while real men play Eve. If you're an adult that plays WoW then that just means that you have the mental faculties of a teenager. If you don't masturbate furiously over the idea of destroying something that a player spent months building, causing them to quit the game, then you're obviously an uptight wuss with no idea what *real fun* is.
For christ's sake, just take a look at the responses by Eve players in this article. You'll see pretty much ALL of those accusations here in this thread. It can't just be that people find Eve boring and masochistic, and find WoW fun, oh no. It must be that the WoW player has some deep personal or mental problems.
Seriously. If Eve players would just shut up and play their game, they wouldn't get so much hate. Pretty much 2/3 of the Eve players that wander around evangelizing their game make me want to stay as far away from it as possible, because it'd mean playing with even more immature jackasses than you find in other online games.
Seriously, look what YOU wrote: "The positive upside to this, is that Eve has a built in retard filter. We don't have the issues with whiny-assed 14 year olds and other similiar pea-brains that MMO's like WoW have."
Given the quality of Eve players that deign to grace us with their opinions on WoW, I find that highly, HIGHLY unlikely.
Oh, and I'm tired of hearing that complexity makes the game good. Complexity is neutral: good games can be complex, and they can be simple too. Challenge has no bearing on complexity, and neither does the quality of the games. Some of the best games I've played were exceedingly simple, while some of the worst I've played piled on the complexity using the same logic as the Eve advocates.
Well there was a Supreme Court case that upheld private gun rights, so I don't think we'll have to worry until new Supreme Court justices are appointed. If Obama gets to appoint new SC justices, then they might have a chance at ramming threw more onerous gun control laws.
I wouldn't say that being a POW makes one worthy of respect. Sympathy, yes, because its a horrible situation, but they didn't have to do anything special or principled to be captured. What makes McCain worthy of respect is that he refused preferential release. Even if it was following the letter of the military code of conduct, its still a helluva thing to put up with that kind of torture when given a way out.
Its hard to mis-type armor as army, but if you're typing quickly without thinking thoroughly about what you're typing, its pretty easy to swap two words that seem similar and share some sort of conceptual similarity (an army may use armor). I'd say its safer to chalk it up to a mistake rather than make this into some sort of witch hunt.
Agreed. I could stomach a person that defended cases that I disagreed with based on the case that everyone deserves fair representation in court, and carries out that representation ethically. The RIAA cases, however, have been pretty unethical from top to bottom, disregarding whether you agree or disagree with their position.
Unfortunate, but the guilty deserve a good defense, even if they are guilty. We have to make sure we do our best not to lock up the innocent. Despite the outcome, I'd have to applaud the lawyer for defending a client to the best of his ability, even if he thought the client was guilty. I don't think I'd have the stomach for that, but its a job that needs to be done for our legal system to even resembling something close to justice.
Make no mistake, I am not trying to support Obama's decision. Especially considering that his second pick was Ogden who, according to TFA, "...was responsible for organizing the defense of the Child Online Protection Act..." and "...successfully defended the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act before the U.S. Supreme Court."
I did a bit of research using Google and Wikipedia. Wikipedia has some light information on Tom Perrelli. It seems he is most well-known for his copyright litigation, but did do work for the United States Department of Justice, including tobacco industry litigation. Also he was "... defending the constitutionality of federal statutes, defending federal agency action and regulations, representing the diplomatic and national security interests of the United States in courts of law, and conducting significant Title VII, personnel and social security litigation." That's a pretty sanitized summary, and its hard to find out if he was doing good work or bad, but the bit about defending federal agency actions, regulations, and statues against constitutional question leaves me with a bad feeling in my gut. There's a lot of unjust and unconstitutional laws out there, so I'd place my bets on him defending bad laws rather than good ones.
I couldn't find much on David Ogden, other than his firm's bio page, and fluff pieces. Apparently he was already involved with Obama's transition team and worked for Clinton's administration. He also has experience at the federal level. There's a lot of juicy stuff in the firm's bio page, but he seems to be pretty cozy with media and big corporations. Without a lot of detail, a casual reading suggests that he tends to represent the big corps over the little guys. The only two bright spots seem to be "Obtaining summary judgment and affirmance... rejecting the claims of a major tobacco company seeking to shut down the.. nationwide counter-marketing campaign to discourage young people from smoking", and "Representing a US media company with respect to the detention and threatened prosecution by US Forces and the Iraq government of the company's Iraqi employee."
Overall, not much to be happy about. It looks like he picked two big-business, media-friendly lawyers. They have a lot of federal-level experience, but not the kind I would have wanted.
The Democrats have always been fairly cozy with the media industries in particular, so it wouldn't surprise me if Obama is likewise fairly cozy with them.
My question is whether the RIAA stuff is the sum of what this lawyer has done with his career, or if there are other achievements, perhaps more noteworthy. It could be that the lawyer in question is indifferent to the RIAA's ideology and was simply representing them in a professional manner. It definitely doesn't make Obama's pick any less questionable and the lawyer any less scummy, but it would at least assuage my fears that the appointee would be pushing the RIAA's agenda from a position of power.
My personal belief is that if you want to claim that consent was not able to be given, you have to prove so. You know, innocent until proven guilty. Proof may include medical data indicating the person hasn't reached puberty, psychological examination indicating a lack of understanding about sex and sexual issues, mental illnesses, a severe abuse of a trusted position (preacher, teacher, etc), and so on. Don't limit it to one thing, let the prosecution make a case, and let the jury decide if its valid. Whether someone is competent to consent is so arbitrary, that any hard and fast rule that doesn't allow gray areas is going to result in some very bad decisions.
I don't think that this would hinder the prosecution of the real predators out there, but would certainly make it a lot harder to prosecute those indiscretions between two teenagers, or some jail-bait with a fake ID.
As far as pornography, I think they should also have to prove that you sought it out, and were consuming significant amounts of it, and/or distributing it. Just clicking on the wrong link, and getting some in your browser cache shouldn't be enough to railroad you into jail. Again, they should have to make a case that you are encouraging the distribution or production of it, and thus encouraging illegal acts. None of this instantly-guilty bullshit.
Given that I've met "rapists" who's only sin was having consensual sex with a girl who had a boyfriend, I can certainly be that cynical. Rationality goes out the window when someone is accused of a sex crime in America. As soon as you're labeled, you're automatically guilty and whole-heartedly deserving of any punishment up to death.
Agreed. Without an interesting local culture to go along with it, playing on the beach tends to turn into a snooze-fest real fast. I prefer visiting areas with rich history.
Well, now you're just redefining religion into something more general: the actual human condition. Ideologies, group think, herd mentality... they're traits that helped us when we were out in nature and had to depend on our group for survival. They helped the group form, adapt, and react quickly to challenges. The same mental and biological traits can be harnessed to good or bad ends.
In your freedom case, the message is that they are different than us, that they don't like that we are different, and will attack us because we're different. That hits all of the salient points that are involved in group think: their group is not our group, they are a threat (we know this because people don't like things that are different), we must deal with the threat.
If you want to place the blame, then place it appropriately. Just redefining religion to include any belief or way of thinking is intellectually dishonest. There is no god of freedom.
Depends on the flavor of religion. I know a lot of Christians that would be extremely difficult to organize into violence because their flavor leans heavily on the "turn the other cheek" aspects. On the other hand, I've known atheists who have advocated taking religious peoples' children away and committing them to a mental institution. Because, you know, teaching religion is child abuse, and theists are obviously insane. No, I'm not making this up, it was quite literally their position. I've seen genocide, murder, war, suppression, and various other atrocities advocated for such a wide variety of reasons it makes my head spin. The only commonality between the people is that they were all human.
So no, I don't think its safe to say that religion necessarily will make things easier. What makes it easy is that we're human, humans have the same fundamental survival traits as other animals, and these traits can either lead to lifting ourselves up, or putting others down, depending on which we feel is more advantageous to our survival.
For example, America didn't go into Iraq because of our religion, we went into there because our leaders told us that they had WMD, and that it was plausible that they would be used against us. We went there because our leaders told us we were simply defending ourselves. All other justifications were just intended to make us feel better about what we did after the fact.
On the consumer side, we also had a lot of people who believed that housing prices could only go up, and so over-extending yourself was OK, because you could refinance. I was personally told this by an agent trying to get me into a mortgage, and again by friends and coworkers. I opted to just keep renting, because I wasn't comfortable spending literally every penny of my monthly savings allowance on my mortgage and depending on a tax break to make up for it.
Some scientists would. Others might come up with separate studies to try to confirm their bias. Some would dismiss the study as not being rigorous enough. There's a reason we do science the way we do. Double blinds, repeatability, testability, the scientific method... its designed to limit the amount that bias can affect the results. The reality is that even so-called rational scientists are irrational a lot of the time. They've just learned, as a discipline, to deliberately limit the influence that irrationality has on their results.
Do you think that we don't have violence over political philosophies? Territory disputes between nations? Hell, sports teams? Blaming religion is like saying that you're sick with a runny nose when you have a cold: its a symptom, not the cause. The problem is that humans inherently tend to form groups, and submit to group-think and herd mentality in order for those groups function. If you are able to make their group feel that they are at threat from another group, then the first group will try to suppress or harm the other group. It doesn't need to be religion.
Well but then you're not talking about religion but something else. What you're referring to is that its fairly easy to get humans to rally around any sort of idea or belief, and then paint their group as being under attack, which will provoke a defense response. Its a fundamental human nature that gave us a competitive advantage when we were still just small groups strewn about the globe.
I think people give religion too much credit. Religion is not some special-case organization, but rather a simple result of the mental quirks that evolved in humans to help us survive. You can see a lot of the behavior from people who adhere strongly to political parties, racial-supremacy groups, nations (nationalism), and even sports teams. Even the religion-is-bad crowd says a lot of shit that is stunningly similar to a lot of stuff that the religious crowd puts out.
The reality is that its a problem with humanity, not a problem with religious people. Religion just tends to be an easy and comfortable target to project their fears and anger on. Kind-of like the atheist version of Satan and heathens, so to speak. Of course, recognizing that its a human condition brings up all sorts of uncomfortable truths.
Because people don't often care about the details and associate statutory rape with non-statutory rape, sexual assault on a child, and all sorts of other very nasty things. We've had stories of people looking up sex offenders on a list and meting out vigilante justice, only to find out that the person did not actually commit the crime the person thought they did. It can also be that the people in question felt that if charges were brought, then there must be more behind it. A sort-of if-theres-smoke-theres-fire mentality. People do not react rationally to crime, and the effect is several orders of magnitudes more pronounced when the crimes are sexual in nature. Its fairly common to find people who feel that a rape should be punished by torture, rape in prison, death, and a myriad of other extremely savage punishments. Furthermore, its extremely common to simply assume that if a person was accused of rape, he must be a rapist, facts be damned. Which brings us back to the subject at hand...
Did he entertain suing the woman for slander? She knowingly made false statements about him that had material impact upon him. Its the textbook definition. The woman definitely deserves to be hit hard for what she did. I'm guessing that the authorities would have viewed that as blaming the victim though.
Sorry, I think we're talking past each other. Whether it was actually criminal is besides the point. The point is that his buddy was subjected to severe discrimination and social stigma for what most would consider personally acceptable behavior at best, and probably slightly immoral at average. Its a far cry from what I would consider an actual rape, which has extremely severe emotional, physical, and societal consequences for the victim. That was the point that I felt the guy was trying to make: that public opinion is used as a bludgeon for retribution far beyond that which is deserved.
The fact that he committed a crime doesn't necessarily correlate with whether a stigma is deserved, nor does it necessarily correlate with what type of crime the public thinks you committed. A relationship between a 17 and 21 year old is perfectly normal in a huge portion of the world. When accused of statutory rape, most people imagine a pedophile having sex with children. The two are worlds are part in severity. Furthermore, in the example, the father initially approved and then later filed charges as a way of getting back at the man. Its a perfect example of using the law to crucify a person in the court of public opinion. The fact that he broke the law doesn't change the fact that the social stigma was undeserved.
He deserves to be thought of as an idiot for not using protection, not as a child rapist.
No, McGrew's point was that the woman falsely accused the team. The comment about her probably being a prostitute was an aside, probably to point out that the woman wasn't as squeeky clean of a woman as people like to imagine. Maybe it was irrelevant, but you're glossing over the main point that McGrew was clarifying: accusations of rape carry huge amounts of weight in public, and often cause very extreme consequences even if the accused is proven innocent.
Snowgirl basically sidestepped the point of the cautionary tale. The point was that the father saw no problem with this relationship. The father decided after the fact to explicitly use a relationship he previously approved of to "get back" at the person. This is a demonstration of how accusations of rape can carry serious consequences.
In this case the person did commit "statutory rape," but the point is reality of the situation is benign. A 17 year old sleeping with a 21 year old is not a big deal, and is, in many states, perfectly legal. But the public opinion turned this into something far more severe, and undeserved. Snowgirl ignored this point. Furthermore, I would submit that having a fairly normal sexual relationship is not deserving of such social stigma, and simply pointing out, in capital letters, that he commited a crime does not excuse the stigma.
As far as accusations of not being over the rape, its innapropriate, but notasunprovoked as you're suggesting. Comments like that tend to piss people off, myself included.
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I played FFXI for a little over a year. It wasn't harder. Putting in XP penalties on death and caps on XP (making you have to chain to break the caps) doesn't actually up the difficulty, just the time it takes to get through.
I could literally play FFXI by looking at the screen once every 30 seconds or so. I'd watch TV or movies to keep the tedium down. I can't do that with WoW. I also die a lot more in WoW than I ever did in FFXI. This is because FFXI is not hard. Its very simple, and very rote. You do the same actions over and over in parties for hours on end, with little variation. What it is, is tedius. Most MMO players tend to confuse the two.
Well, unless they managed to change that in the last two expansions. I quite a while after Chains of Promathia.
If people just said that Eve is not for anyone, then people wouldn't have a problem. In general, though, I find Eve players to be arrogant and irritating:
If you don't like Eve, its because you're a moron. If you found it boring, then you didn't do it right or have ADD. Needless complexity is good because it weeds out the moron. Griefing is the ultimate form of entertainment, and if you don't like the idea of your hard work being blown up then you're a wussy carebare. WoW is a MMO on training wheels, and you're a drooling moron if you like it. Eve is obviously the best MMO out there, and if you disagree you're wrong or a dumbass teenager. Teenagers play WoW while real men play Eve. If you're an adult that plays WoW then that just means that you have the mental faculties of a teenager. If you don't masturbate furiously over the idea of destroying something that a player spent months building, causing them to quit the game, then you're obviously an uptight wuss with no idea what *real fun* is.
For christ's sake, just take a look at the responses by Eve players in this article. You'll see pretty much ALL of those accusations here in this thread. It can't just be that people find Eve boring and masochistic, and find WoW fun, oh no. It must be that the WoW player has some deep personal or mental problems.
Seriously. If Eve players would just shut up and play their game, they wouldn't get so much hate. Pretty much 2/3 of the Eve players that wander around evangelizing their game make me want to stay as far away from it as possible, because it'd mean playing with even more immature jackasses than you find in other online games.
Seriously, look what YOU wrote:
"The positive upside to this, is that Eve has a built in retard filter. We don't have the issues with whiny-assed 14 year olds and other similiar pea-brains that MMO's like WoW have."
Given the quality of Eve players that deign to grace us with their opinions on WoW, I find that highly, HIGHLY unlikely.
Oh, and I'm tired of hearing that complexity makes the game good. Complexity is neutral: good games can be complex, and they can be simple too. Challenge has no bearing on complexity, and neither does the quality of the games. Some of the best games I've played were exceedingly simple, while some of the worst I've played piled on the complexity using the same logic as the Eve advocates.
Well he'd been accused of racism in more than one comment, and I mixed up your comment with the others. Sorry about that.
Well there was a Supreme Court case that upheld private gun rights, so I don't think we'll have to worry until new Supreme Court justices are appointed. If Obama gets to appoint new SC justices, then they might have a chance at ramming threw more onerous gun control laws.
I wouldn't say that being a POW makes one worthy of respect. Sympathy, yes, because its a horrible situation, but they didn't have to do anything special or principled to be captured. What makes McCain worthy of respect is that he refused preferential release. Even if it was following the letter of the military code of conduct, its still a helluva thing to put up with that kind of torture when given a way out.
Its hard to mis-type armor as army, but if you're typing quickly without thinking thoroughly about what you're typing, its pretty easy to swap two words that seem similar and share some sort of conceptual similarity (an army may use armor). I'd say its safer to chalk it up to a mistake rather than make this into some sort of witch hunt.
Agreed. I could stomach a person that defended cases that I disagreed with based on the case that everyone deserves fair representation in court, and carries out that representation ethically. The RIAA cases, however, have been pretty unethical from top to bottom, disregarding whether you agree or disagree with their position.
Number two is David Ogden, according to the article. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
Unfortunate, but the guilty deserve a good defense, even if they are guilty. We have to make sure we do our best not to lock up the innocent. Despite the outcome, I'd have to applaud the lawyer for defending a client to the best of his ability, even if he thought the client was guilty. I don't think I'd have the stomach for that, but its a job that needs to be done for our legal system to even resembling something close to justice.
Make no mistake, I am not trying to support Obama's decision. Especially considering that his second pick was Ogden who, according to TFA, "...was responsible for organizing the defense of the Child Online Protection Act..." and "...successfully defended the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act before the U.S. Supreme Court."
I did a bit of research using Google and Wikipedia. Wikipedia has some light information on Tom Perrelli. It seems he is most well-known for his copyright litigation, but did do work for the United States Department of Justice, including tobacco industry litigation. Also he was "... defending the constitutionality of federal statutes, defending federal agency action and regulations, representing the diplomatic and national security interests of the United States in courts of law, and conducting significant Title VII, personnel and social security litigation." That's a pretty sanitized summary, and its hard to find out if he was doing good work or bad, but the bit about defending federal agency actions, regulations, and statues against constitutional question leaves me with a bad feeling in my gut. There's a lot of unjust and unconstitutional laws out there, so I'd place my bets on him defending bad laws rather than good ones.
I couldn't find much on David Ogden, other than his firm's bio page, and fluff pieces. Apparently he was already involved with Obama's transition team and worked for Clinton's administration. He also has experience at the federal level. There's a lot of juicy stuff in the firm's bio page, but he seems to be pretty cozy with media and big corporations. Without a lot of detail, a casual reading suggests that he tends to represent the big corps over the little guys. The only two bright spots seem to be "Obtaining summary judgment and affirmance ... rejecting the claims of a major tobacco company seeking to shut down the .. nationwide counter-marketing campaign to discourage young people from smoking", and "Representing a US media company with respect to the detention and threatened prosecution by US Forces and the Iraq government of the company's Iraqi employee."
Overall, not much to be happy about. It looks like he picked two big-business, media-friendly lawyers. They have a lot of federal-level experience, but not the kind I would have wanted.
The Democrats have always been fairly cozy with the media industries in particular, so it wouldn't surprise me if Obama is likewise fairly cozy with them.
My question is whether the RIAA stuff is the sum of what this lawyer has done with his career, or if there are other achievements, perhaps more noteworthy. It could be that the lawyer in question is indifferent to the RIAA's ideology and was simply representing them in a professional manner. It definitely doesn't make Obama's pick any less questionable and the lawyer any less scummy, but it would at least assuage my fears that the appointee would be pushing the RIAA's agenda from a position of power.
My personal belief is that if you want to claim that consent was not able to be given, you have to prove so. You know, innocent until proven guilty. Proof may include medical data indicating the person hasn't reached puberty, psychological examination indicating a lack of understanding about sex and sexual issues, mental illnesses, a severe abuse of a trusted position (preacher, teacher, etc), and so on. Don't limit it to one thing, let the prosecution make a case, and let the jury decide if its valid. Whether someone is competent to consent is so arbitrary, that any hard and fast rule that doesn't allow gray areas is going to result in some very bad decisions.
I don't think that this would hinder the prosecution of the real predators out there, but would certainly make it a lot harder to prosecute those indiscretions between two teenagers, or some jail-bait with a fake ID.
As far as pornography, I think they should also have to prove that you sought it out, and were consuming significant amounts of it, and/or distributing it. Just clicking on the wrong link, and getting some in your browser cache shouldn't be enough to railroad you into jail. Again, they should have to make a case that you are encouraging the distribution or production of it, and thus encouraging illegal acts. None of this instantly-guilty bullshit.
Given that I've met "rapists" who's only sin was having consensual sex with a girl who had a boyfriend, I can certainly be that cynical. Rationality goes out the window when someone is accused of a sex crime in America. As soon as you're labeled, you're automatically guilty and whole-heartedly deserving of any punishment up to death.
Agreed. Without an interesting local culture to go along with it, playing on the beach tends to turn into a snooze-fest real fast. I prefer visiting areas with rich history.
Well, now you're just redefining religion into something more general: the actual human condition. Ideologies, group think, herd mentality... they're traits that helped us when we were out in nature and had to depend on our group for survival. They helped the group form, adapt, and react quickly to challenges. The same mental and biological traits can be harnessed to good or bad ends.
In your freedom case, the message is that they are different than us, that they don't like that we are different, and will attack us because we're different. That hits all of the salient points that are involved in group think: their group is not our group, they are a threat (we know this because people don't like things that are different), we must deal with the threat.
If you want to place the blame, then place it appropriately. Just redefining religion to include any belief or way of thinking is intellectually dishonest. There is no god of freedom.
Depends on the flavor of religion. I know a lot of Christians that would be extremely difficult to organize into violence because their flavor leans heavily on the "turn the other cheek" aspects. On the other hand, I've known atheists who have advocated taking religious peoples' children away and committing them to a mental institution. Because, you know, teaching religion is child abuse, and theists are obviously insane. No, I'm not making this up, it was quite literally their position. I've seen genocide, murder, war, suppression, and various other atrocities advocated for such a wide variety of reasons it makes my head spin. The only commonality between the people is that they were all human.
So no, I don't think its safe to say that religion necessarily will make things easier. What makes it easy is that we're human, humans have the same fundamental survival traits as other animals, and these traits can either lead to lifting ourselves up, or putting others down, depending on which we feel is more advantageous to our survival.
For example, America didn't go into Iraq because of our religion, we went into there because our leaders told us that they had WMD, and that it was plausible that they would be used against us. We went there because our leaders told us we were simply defending ourselves. All other justifications were just intended to make us feel better about what we did after the fact.
On the consumer side, we also had a lot of people who believed that housing prices could only go up, and so over-extending yourself was OK, because you could refinance. I was personally told this by an agent trying to get me into a mortgage, and again by friends and coworkers. I opted to just keep renting, because I wasn't comfortable spending literally every penny of my monthly savings allowance on my mortgage and depending on a tax break to make up for it.
Some scientists would. Others might come up with separate studies to try to confirm their bias. Some would dismiss the study as not being rigorous enough. There's a reason we do science the way we do. Double blinds, repeatability, testability, the scientific method... its designed to limit the amount that bias can affect the results. The reality is that even so-called rational scientists are irrational a lot of the time. They've just learned, as a discipline, to deliberately limit the influence that irrationality has on their results.
Do you think that we don't have violence over political philosophies? Territory disputes between nations? Hell, sports teams? Blaming religion is like saying that you're sick with a runny nose when you have a cold: its a symptom, not the cause. The problem is that humans inherently tend to form groups, and submit to group-think and herd mentality in order for those groups function. If you are able to make their group feel that they are at threat from another group, then the first group will try to suppress or harm the other group. It doesn't need to be religion.
Well but then you're not talking about religion but something else. What you're referring to is that its fairly easy to get humans to rally around any sort of idea or belief, and then paint their group as being under attack, which will provoke a defense response. Its a fundamental human nature that gave us a competitive advantage when we were still just small groups strewn about the globe.
I think people give religion too much credit. Religion is not some special-case organization, but rather a simple result of the mental quirks that evolved in humans to help us survive. You can see a lot of the behavior from people who adhere strongly to political parties, racial-supremacy groups, nations (nationalism), and even sports teams. Even the religion-is-bad crowd says a lot of shit that is stunningly similar to a lot of stuff that the religious crowd puts out.
The reality is that its a problem with humanity, not a problem with religious people. Religion just tends to be an easy and comfortable target to project their fears and anger on. Kind-of like the atheist version of Satan and heathens, so to speak. Of course, recognizing that its a human condition brings up all sorts of uncomfortable truths.
incapable, not capable.
Because people don't often care about the details and associate statutory rape with non-statutory rape, sexual assault on a child, and all sorts of other very nasty things. We've had stories of people looking up sex offenders on a list and meting out vigilante justice, only to find out that the person did not actually commit the crime the person thought they did. It can also be that the people in question felt that if charges were brought, then there must be more behind it. A sort-of if-theres-smoke-theres-fire mentality. People do not react rationally to crime, and the effect is several orders of magnitudes more pronounced when the crimes are sexual in nature. Its fairly common to find people who feel that a rape should be punished by torture, rape in prison, death, and a myriad of other extremely savage punishments. Furthermore, its extremely common to simply assume that if a person was accused of rape, he must be a rapist, facts be damned. Which brings us back to the subject at hand...
Did he entertain suing the woman for slander? She knowingly made false statements about him that had material impact upon him. Its the textbook definition. The woman definitely deserves to be hit hard for what she did. I'm guessing that the authorities would have viewed that as blaming the victim though.
Sorry, I think we're talking past each other. Whether it was actually criminal is besides the point. The point is that his buddy was subjected to severe discrimination and social stigma for what most would consider personally acceptable behavior at best, and probably slightly immoral at average. Its a far cry from what I would consider an actual rape, which has extremely severe emotional, physical, and societal consequences for the victim. That was the point that I felt the guy was trying to make: that public opinion is used as a bludgeon for retribution far beyond that which is deserved.
The fact that he committed a crime doesn't necessarily correlate with whether a stigma is deserved, nor does it necessarily correlate with what type of crime the public thinks you committed. A relationship between a 17 and 21 year old is perfectly normal in a huge portion of the world. When accused of statutory rape, most people imagine a pedophile having sex with children. The two are worlds are part in severity. Furthermore, in the example, the father initially approved and then later filed charges as a way of getting back at the man. Its a perfect example of using the law to crucify a person in the court of public opinion. The fact that he broke the law doesn't change the fact that the social stigma was undeserved.
He deserves to be thought of as an idiot for not using protection, not as a child rapist.
No, McGrew's point was that the woman falsely accused the team. The comment about her probably being a prostitute was an aside, probably to point out that the woman wasn't as squeeky clean of a woman as people like to imagine. Maybe it was irrelevant, but you're glossing over the main point that McGrew was clarifying: accusations of rape carry huge amounts of weight in public, and often cause very extreme consequences even if the accused is proven innocent.
Snowgirl basically sidestepped the point of the cautionary tale. The point was that the father saw no problem with this relationship. The father decided after the fact to explicitly use a relationship he previously approved of to "get back" at the person. This is a demonstration of how accusations of rape can carry serious consequences.
In this case the person did commit "statutory rape," but the point is reality of the situation is benign. A 17 year old sleeping with a 21 year old is not a big deal, and is, in many states, perfectly legal. But the public opinion turned this into something far more severe, and undeserved. Snowgirl ignored this point. Furthermore, I would submit that having a fairly normal sexual relationship is not deserving of such social stigma, and simply pointing out, in capital letters, that he commited a crime does not excuse the stigma.
As far as accusations of not being over the rape, its innapropriate, but not as unprovoked as you're suggesting. Comments like that tend to piss people off, myself included.