Omar
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Posts posted by Omar
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OK, good, we're arguing about entirely different things then, but I can't quite pinpoint what you're talking about. What problem are we considering, that the instrumentality of one's own actions in the violation of one's rights is relevant?
Typically I see "blaming the victim" as what people say to try to excuse the perpetrator's actions. I don't think anyone is trying to excuse the rapist.
Yep, that's a good way to put it. Blame is a pretty strong word and it implies some sort of retribution is legitimate, and that's not what obfuscator was arguing I think.
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Perhaps "responsible" isn't what I mean then, or at least not from a legal sense. I've already said multiple times that the kind of responsibility I'm speaking of (for lack of a better word) shouldn't affect the punishment.
There's a kind of feeling that rape and other such crimes are inevitable that I take issue with, which is why I've been responding in this manner. There are things people can do, ways they can behave to lessen the chances they'll be victimized - yet such things are often ignored and I find that disappointing. And it's not just with rape, it's with the majority of crimes. Common sense and caution are virtues often (unfortunately) sadly lacking when examining criminal actions.
If by "examining criminal actions", you're referring to trials, you've already said they are irrelevant since the lack of common sense in question does not warrant punishment, and punishing is all a court does. Yes, you should obviously use common sense when transporting money bags, just like you should exercise caution when considering sexual relations with a drunk person as they may falsely accuse you of rape, but only because there's a chance that your rights will be violated, not because you have a duty to do so. If you agree that in your example about theft, a) the victim does not deserve to be punished b) the thief does not merit mitigation of his punishment, then in what other sphere of legal action can this be relevant to? Who else will be answerable/responsible/accountable (all the same concept, AFAIK)?
@Kim: I don't understand what you're saying :P
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But that's not what responsibility is, legally speaking. To be responsible for something means that you are answerable for it, which implies you've got duties towards another person.
To put things into perspective, if responsible, defined in the sense relevant to legal issues, a rape victim would be punishable. If not, then how is it relevant that a person is "non-morally responsible", since all the law does is explicit what punishments will be carried out regarding certain behaviours?
This isn't even a matter of blaming the victim IMO, you're just talking about issues that concern neither the moral nor legal aspect of the issue. He or she played a part in creating the circumstances leading to the rape, sure. So what? How does this change the way the issue should be approached?
In defense of obfuscator, it isn't this particular crime in which he intends to "blame the victim", just any case in which the victim really made things easy for the aggressor. I try to be sensitive to criticisms of rape culture, but I don't think they apply all the time.
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EDIT: If we're talking purely about moral responsibility, that can be different. Responsibility and moral responsibility aren't necessarily the same.
Look at the word responsibility, think about where it comes from, and then try to distinguish "moral responsibility" and "responsibility" again.
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Is that what the law says though? My understanding of the matter is that a person cannot legally consent at all once alcohol has been ingested, although I'm obviously not an expert. I also see no way in which this law can really be practically enforced.
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I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what you meant by it. That being drunk prevents you permission from agreeing to a contract of any nature?
Contract isn't the right word, I think, because I understand those to be explicit and to exist in the longer term, which is why they require enforcement. I mean that any transfer or exchange of property, i.e. buying a drink when you're already drunk, or buying your friends a round, requires a type consent which doesn't seem to be of a different nature as that necessary for sexual relations. The aforementioned examples, if this is true, should then be considered theft.
I'm going to disagree with the notion that both parties can be responsible. In the case where consent can be given when intoxicated, the sex was consensual albeit harmful in the long run, and therefore no one can be responsible. In the case where it can't, the rapist is solely responsible, just like a woman wearing a short skirt in a sketchy neighbourhood isn't responsible for putting herself in a "dangerous situation" if she gets raped. You might say she didn't think it through, but that does not make her morally responsible.
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Ginger, can I draw your attention to the point I made about consent in exchanges?
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My bad, Ginger. Did seem really high to me. That being said, I don't think stats are all that relevant considering how sketchy the justice is when it comes to rape, especially the number of actual prosecutions for false claims. One would hope that some of those false claims are included in that >90% of cases where the defendant is found not guilty.
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35% of people convicted of rape in the US between 1989 and 2012 were exonerated.
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I figure this is as good a place as any. How does everyone feel about intoxication and consent?
This is you reading this thread after asking that question and then not participating in the discussion :P
Haha sorry, I've been at work and busy with other arguments, so I haven't even gotten the chance to read everything yet. My therefore uneducated guess on the matter is that consent is not restricted to explicit contracts or sex, but also to exchanges or gifts (for obvious reasons, you need another person's consent to take their property and replace it with yours, or just outright take it). It does not, however, seem to be the case that you are forbidden from selling things to drunk people, as countless gas station clerks have been gracious enough to do for me (Jamaican patties aw ye). If I'm getting this right, there's an inconsistency.
In addition, if "drunk consent" doesn't count as actual consent, then indeed having sex with a drunk person is rape, whether they go to court about it or not. "False rape accusations" implies no alcohol was involved. It's a little bit like saying "deciding you've been a victim of pedophilia when you were 15 after you've turned 16 is a false rape accusation". The whole point of defining consent that way is that you can't make a proper decision before being sober/old enough.
Again, I haven't been reading, so ignore me if that's not the point.
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I figure this is as good a place as any. How does everyone feel about intoxication and consent?
Mod Edit: This was split off from the relationship thread. Since this is such a controversial issue, please use care while posting. Thanks ~ Kimberly
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Feel free to do so, but just be aware that you're telling everyone you meet that you didn't think they'd be worth dressing properly for. The issue is not that you should always dress/type properly, it's just that it's in your self-interest to do so, especially with people who don't know you.
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i'd like to add though, that one who dresses "smart" can still be a total illiterate fool and/or socially stunted in all aspects :)
which concludes, that proper spelling and/or punctuation and dressing have only one thing in common. they can both be used to camouflage ignorance. (knowing how to spell does not reflect ones intelligence)
I think you're missing the point. What you wear says something, regardless of what it is. When you wear sweatpants, you communicate--whether you mean it or not--that you don't care. When you wear a suit to work, you communicate the opposite. Refusing to acknowledge this is like refusing to acknowledge that the sound /ʃɪt/ and the doodle /shit/ are offensive to many people, yelling/writing them everywhere, and then saying they're just noises and shapes and don't have any inherent content and expecting everyone to take you seriously regardless. The same goes for spelling.
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Spelling properly, just like dressing properly, has a signification. It means you're willing to put in effort. If you're not, then why should I be?
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https://docs.google....qijaJWud3E/edit
On the other hand, it is not so widely known that when criminal aggressors possess guns in a crime incident, they are substantially less likely to attack and injure their victims in the first place. At least nineteen studies have found that offenders possessing guns are less likely to injure their victims than offenders with other weapons or no weapons. The explanation appears to be that possession of a lethal weapon enables aggressors to intimidate victims without actually attacking them, in crimes where the offender’s goal is not to kill the victim. Since a killing cannot occur if a wound is not inflicted, this is a fatality-reducing effect of aggressor gun possession. Thus, even gun possession by aggressors has some inadvertently violence-reducing effects, along with the violence-increasing ‘lethality effect.’ Nevertheless, the net effect of offender gun possession is that it increases the likelihood that a violent crime will result in the death of the victim.I imagine "violent crime" involves use of force (as opposed to simple threat). Moreover, the proliferation of guns does not necessarily mean crime will increase. As I explained to Smelly Paws, you don't want to remove guns, since you want the state to have them. This seems evidence enough to me that guns don't always lead to homicide. It depends whose hands they're in. Guns also make it much easier to defend yourself for reasons you've already explained, especially if your opponent has a physical advantage in combat without firearms (he's a giant, for example). Killing people can be a good thing in the case of self-defense; the problem is murder.
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Wrong thread, but BMSR is awesome.
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That’s a lot to reply to so I’ll take some main points:
@Omar – When you accuse me of advocating state violence because I believe less guns are good your argument becomes much more desperate and irrelevant. You’d learn a lot by looking at the UK guns are nowhere near as common as the US, yet the police are only armed in emergencies. Your view is anti-state, yet it is probably the state that gives you the lifestyle you’re accustomed to, gives you freedom of speech and provides a barrier of protection between you and anarchy. Time to grow up.
Oh wow, you just called all of classical liberalism childish, and to boot you don't know what the word "anarchy" means. You refuse to discriminate between guns in the hand of good people and guns in the hands of bad people by calling it a powder keg, but the difference between guns in the hands of the state and guns in the hands of criminals is so obvious to you it needs no explaining, and anyone who questions it needs to grow up.
I was actually working from a proposition you agree with, namely the idea that we need a state. If that is the case, then we need guns, because that's where the state gets its power. Therefore not all guns are bad. Whichever side you're on when it comes to gun control, you can't escape this admission, because gun control requires the initiation of force.
Also, chart 1, correlation is not causation. Maybe the fact that crime is dropping is causing the gun ownership rate to go down.
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He probably got one for counter-trolling boysloveme15. I never forgot that.
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You're ignoring a point I've made twice already. Guns are not the same depending on whose hands they are in. What you don't realize is that you too want more violence. You want violence by the state against the individual. It is veiled by threats and laws, but that is what a state is--an institution which has a monopoly on the initiation of force. Gun control cannot exist without a sword of Damocles hanging above your head. Gun control laws are more guns, more violence, more incarceration, and more expropriation.
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It's the "tactics" that bothers me, not the "deflection". Truth doesn't need bad arguments. By saying I'm deliberately using arguments I know to be unsound, you're essentially claiming that I'm wrong and that I know it, yet won't admit it--that I'm not telling the truth.
Because, you know, it's not possible that I could think what you listed is irrelevant. Of course I know knives and guns are different. The point is that it seems to me the reason why you want people to be liable for damage done with their property is that otherwise, it will cause harm (but to be fair you haven't actually stated it). But why do you not say the same for other things? Sure, knives cause less deaths, but then the liability can be lesser. What you should be able to do, if your point was as consistent as you think it is, is have a content-agnostic principle by which you gauge a weapon and deduce what the legal implications are. But I've yet to hear it.
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Actually, I just found the story:
http://beforeitsnews...ng-2524596.html
So, unless you don't count a case in which someone was stopped from shooting a lot of people as a mass shooting, it has happened before. Technically the officer was not a civilian, but she was off-duty, which is essentially the same.
"No guns allowed" signs don't give you an incentive to go back. I mean, you're going to shoot as many people as you can. That extra charge isn't going to change your decision. They do, however, give you an incentive to go in that specific location, because they're a signal that your rampage will be greatly facilitated. It's not that shooters don't respond to incentives at all, it's just that "no guns allowed" is a perverse incentive.
@Smelly:
Mexico doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's right below the United States and the drug trade between the two are very much related.
My solution is "bad people have guns, we need good people with guns". There's no argument in what you wrote, anyway.
Yes, I do think the fact that no one will stop a shooter from killing people until the cops show up in certain places is an incentive to choose those places to go on a rampage. It seems like the efficient thing to do if you want to kill as many people as possible.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/09/10/did-colorado-shooter-single-out-cinemark-theater/
I think you started off pretty well saying "apples and oranges". Prove that they are apples and oranges and that the difference is relevant and I'll drop it. Stop assuming I'm in it to convince you of false things; it's nothing short of calling your opponent a liar.
Intoxication and Consent - morality, legality, and other shenanigans
in Off-Topic
Posted
Suppose both are wasted, has a rape occurred? Neither gave consent, but committing another crime in that state would result in punishment, so are we to believe that both are rapists and rape victims?
[Edit]
@muggi: K, so we're talking about different things. Here's a way to put things I think none of us can disagree with:
- so long as no rights are violated, it is neither immoral nor illegal to do something like go out in the street with wads of bills in your hands or get wasted beyond ability to consent, therefore, you are neither accountable, nor responsible, nor answerable.
- that being said, while you are not in the wrong for doing either of those things, these actions are instrumental in the creation of circumstances that made the perpetration of a crime possible or more likely. This is different from being at fault, but it does mean that the whole ordeal could have been avoided.
- therefore it's perfectly reasonable to teach people to drink carefully or to conceal their money, not because it's their fault if something bad happens to them but because it's in their self-interest to do so, because what is immoral and illegal doesn't magically stop happening. After the case, however, since the victim was in the right, they are 100% innocent.
Fair?