Nice choices, in general. I particularly appreciate the mention of Aenima and OK Computer.
But.
Wish You Were Here from Pink Floyd is gorgeous from start to finish, and the title track is probably the most honestly heartbreaking ode to lost a friend ever written.
Well, if you are going luxury, you want the Le Creuset Screwpull. If you really want a rabbit, for god's sake don't skimp on a cheap one. They are notorious for "eating" corks (that is, you can't get the cork out of the corkscrew).
I'm so in love with the idea of Mary-Jane being killed that I'll start buying Spider-man if it goes down. If a time-travel story makes it so PP&MJ never married and she gets to live, so much the better. I don't hate the woman, but Spidey being married sucks.
The corkscrew with the grip is best IMO, especially the ones with the levers that help pull the cork out. The waiter's friend is great but requires more skill and is best when you need to carry a corkscrew in a pocket (like if you're a waiter...or a wino).
More astonishing (to me) is the fact that, under the state law at the time, if he had just had intercourse with her, he wouldn't be in this mess. That he allowed a girl to (voluntarily, by the way...in case you haven't bothered to familiarize yourself with the case) perform oral sex on him is what got him the aggravated child molestation conviction.
The difference? Mere intercourse was excepted by the state's "Romeo and Juliet" law, and would have resulted in a 1-year sentence for a misdemeanor, and would not have required him to register for the rest of his life as a sex offender.
Now, Georgia's "Romeo and Juliet" law has been amended to except oral sex as well, in large part due to the outcry over Genarlow Wilson's situation. Sadly, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the law could not be retroactively applied to his case.
The tragedy is not that this young man is being punished for a dumb decision, but the severity of the punishment and the illogic with which it was applied. Even the jurors in the case expressed dismay when they learned after their decision that the sentence would be ten years in prison.
The careless mistake of allowing a girl to give oral sex instead of just "giving it to her proper" has made the difference between a misdemeanor (and almost certainly probation rather than prison for at least half the one-year sentence) and the complete derailing of an otherwise-promising young scholar-athlete's life with a felony conviction, ten years in prison, and lifetime registration as a sex offender.
How has justice been served? It has not.
BONUS:
Quote from Zith »
To further jeopardize the idea that I have any feelings, I'll share that my girlfriend was raped just last night, and yet, I don't want the perpetrator to die, nor do I want him to spend the rest of his life in prison. I think 20 or 30 years in prison with no chance of parole for the first, say, 10 years, and then keeping him on notice for the rest of his life is appropriate. Oh, and forcing the cost of the resulting therapy on him.
So there you have it, from a victim's boyfriend.
Just last night? Wowie. Until just now, I thought I was the most heartless forgiving person I knew. Well done.
Okay, I just got done watching a great series of bad scenes titled Grindhouse.
A machine gun leg...that fires at a thought? She never touched it. Also, when she held it up to Skip's face, the angle looked impossible. Also...no gun could simply launch her into the air like that. It's absolutely retarded.
Then, in the second half, Deathproof...what can I say? The ending was simply horrible. I know that these two films were designed to mock the 60's and 70's style of movie, but this went above and beyond anything that bad. That, and in the final chase scene, the man was shifting without moving his hand. It had the obvious audio cue of shift shock, but he was unable to touch the shifter. One arm was useless and the other was on the wheel.
No offense, but you have completely missed the point of Grindhouse. They didn't "mock the 60's and 70's style of movie," they paid homage to a specific type of violence exploitation flick. In those old movies, the production values were so low it didn't matter if there were logical inconsistencies or -- for that matter -- missing or out-of-order reels. It just mattered that there was action, violence, and maybe a little sex. The Grindhouse movies are intended to be ridiculous, hyper-aggressive, trash art, and they succeed spectacularly.
Anyway...
In Spiderman 3, when Flint Marko and everything on him is turned into sand in the demolecularizer, the locket with his daughter's picture is unaffected. Why?
Oh, and howzacome in War of the Worlds (the recent remake) after the aliens jack up all the electric and electronic machinery, there's a dude with a working camcorder recording the tripod coming up outta the ground. Huh?
I've had MusicMatch Jukebox since forever; the mass file-renaming option of the "super-tagging" feature in very handy indeed. It lets you rename the files according to the info in the track tags. I've actually used this feature to strip off and replace things likes "Various Artists" en masse from the filenames of soundtracks and compilations. I don't know whether WMP has a similar feature.
the photo of her crying in the cop car says "reality check" all over it. You get DUIs you go to jail, that is if you dont kill some one first. DUIs are serious stuff. Also it tickels me pink shes cracking up, come on its 45 days. get real paris.
Funny thing is, her sentence was even reduced to 23 days, three of which she was already through. Poor dear...
Do you mean to imply that the FBI is the only organization capable of producing valid conclusions on this subject, or am I erroneously inferring it?
I believe you misunderstand. I mentioned it only because the original statement which prompted my request for its source was that the FBI had made the findings contained in the document. I wanted only to clarify that the conclusions drawn were not the FBI's. I meant to express no disagreement with the conclusions of the training manual; in fact, I think it is an excellent document and I hope it has been or will be widely adopted by law enforcement agencies.
This isn't new. In the module they explicitly note that estimates of the number of rape allegations that are false vary from 0% to 98%. I don't really get what you're trying to say here.
As you imply, I am simply stating the obvious.
I do believe that the wide discrepancy supports my prior arguments regarding personal responsibility, though. It is the very fact that false allegations are made at all that makes eliminating ambiguity so important, in my view.
Firstly, anecdotal statements by experts with relatively large data sets available for their anecdotes are more informative and insightful than non-expert anecdotes.
This does not make those statements factually accurate. O'Reilly's statement did not use specific numbers, but estimates which were further qualified with words like "perhaps," "about," and "potentially." He does not say which six-month period he is talking about. He cites a hypothetical example, not a specific case.
Secondly, though he doesn't specifically site non-malicious false allegations, we can deduce that if, out of 50 false allegations, 20 are alibis that don't name an assailant,
And these aren't counted among the malicious because they don't name an assailant. Are they not still false?
...a few more are lonely people trying to get attention, and a few more are mentally ill and delusional (or something), then we might suppose that there are about 30 false allegations...
Thirty false allegations not including the 20 false allegations already discounted for some reason.
...only 5 of which are malicious. I want to note that the MA case that started this thread would count as one of those 30. I point this out to illustrate that in those 25 non-malicious false allegations, most - if not all - of those women believe themselves to be victems of rape.
A woman believing she has been raped does not mean that she was raped.
Regardless of whether the law supports them in that belief, these women will still have to endure the trauma of rape (unless anyone cares to argue that there's a substantial psychological difference between believing you were raped and "technically" being raped.), and now they have to do so without the societal or legal support network that would've been afforded to them had the legal system deemed their rape experience legitimate.p
Because a woman feels traumatized by her delusion, we should prosecute someone for it?
So we might reasonably infer from O'Reilly's expert opinion that around 1.5% of the rape allegations that name an assailant in NYC each year are false. This includes allegations in which the complainant actually believes she was raped and it's still a very low percentage.
And all along, all I have been arguing is that the women in this 1.5% ought to: 1) take responsibility for their own behavior, if that's possible; and 2) not have their allegations prosecuted as though they were true.
Since this took place in 1999, I don't hesitate to speculate that national law enforcement agencies have not learned much if anything from Oakland's problems in 1990. Since this is used in the context of an example, I would also not hesitate to speculate that there are other examples of similar behavior in other jurisdictions. That would further lead me to speculate that this problem is systemic, across many municipalities and not an isolated phenomenon.
So you are less hesitant than I. The example stated that Philadelphia's rate in 1998 was 18%, "twice the national average and the highest rate among the 10 largest cities in America." This to me indicates that the example given is the exception, rather than the rule. Perhaps the problem is systemic -- it certainly appears to have been so in previous decades -- but the example does not convince me that it continued to be in 1999. In fact it seems that many if not most of the country's law enforcement agencies had improved during the 90s. Others, like Philadelphia, had been lagging behind.
Given my personal anecdotal experience and the widespread "common sense" belief that most rape allegations are false or unfounded, and given that nation wide rape allegations are categorized as unfounded four times more often than other crimes, I would feel quite confidant in speculating that this is a nation wide problem.
I have never suggested, nor heard it suggested by anyone to whom I would attribute credibility, that there is any "widespread 'common sense' belief that most rape allegations are false or unfounded." That is a ludicrous statement.
Further, I would point out that the fact that "rape allegations are categorized as unfounded four times more often than other crimes " is an official statement by the FBI, not one of the many other law enforcement agencies whose numbers are believed to be inflated. Is the "four times" estimate accurate? That is, did the FBI account for their findings about improperly unfounded allegations in that estimate? I don't know, though I have already expressed my willingness to stipulate ("for the sake of argument")that it does not, and that the actual number of unfounded allegations is in line with unfounded reports of other crimes.
So, confident though you may be in your speculation, in my estimation you are simply drawing conclusions that are not supported by the facts. As for me, I choose to not jump to conclusions. Hence, "one hesitates to speculate."
I disagree. Since the issue of "valid" consent is a legal one, how the legal system handles sexual assault from the investigation (or lack thereof) onward is critical. The authors specifically discuss the fact that, for a variety of reasons, complainants statements may be inconsistent, misleading, or incomplete.
Sorry, I was speaking from the perspective of the question of valid consent being an ethical distinction, not a legal one. It seemed to me that the technical aspects were brought into the conversation when you asserted that the FBI had made a certain finding -- which I didn't see as particularly relevant but requested validation of anyway -- which then led to this side discussion about whether statistics have been appropriately reported. Other than the O'Reilly quote, there is little that applies to the ethical questions of what is or isn't valid consent. If you saw the prior discussion differently, that's your prerogative, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you, knowing your perspective.
While this makes investigators' jobs much harder, it does not affect whether or not a crime actually took place and it's officer's legal obligation to interview the complainant with a full understanding of the problematic and murky nature of sexual assault cases. The authors state that poor handling of their interviews with the victims will likely destroy their credibility in the eyes of the jury resulting in the acquittal of a guilty man. The law doesn't recognize the ability of a failure to keep your story straight as the negation of a crime. It's not the complainant's job to make detectives' jobs easier - though it does obviously help.
I certainly would not disagree with that. In fact it's the underlying reason why I consider the ethical questions so important. It is because of unfounded allegations that the criminal justice system seems to be prejudiced against accusers.
It is, in America, the burden of the prosecution to prove that a crime has occurred -- not that something occurred, not that the accuser believes that something occurred, but that an actual crime has occurred and, further, that the crime was committed by the accused person. False allegations -- whether fabricated, imagined, coerced, inaccurate, or the result of misunderstanding -- corrupt the process.
My argument continues to be that people ought to be responsible for their parts in mitigating this corruption, by taking responsibility for their own behavior and eliminating ambiguity as much as possible. For specifics, I refer you to my previous posts in this thread.
Quote from Mamelon »
Nice avatar, Ben
I concur. May I presume that is you? You photograph well. But don't expect your handsome face to sway my positions.
For those wishing to view the module BenGreen is referring to, here is a working link. I believe this is the same document; Ben, please correct me if I am mistaken. This is not an FBI document, though it refers to FBI statements made to the press and to the "Uniform Crime
Report" guidelines of that agency, but rather a training document developed by The National Center for Women and Policing ( http://www.womenandpolicing.org/. The conclusions therein are their own, not the FBI's.
As for the statistics, it seems the logical conclusion is that the statistics can be unreliable.
A couple of points:
Harry O'Reilly's 1984 statement (found here) at is non-specific and partially anecdotal, it focuses on "malicious" falsification and specifically excludes cases where the allegation is false but not "malicious."
The Law Enforcement News quote is from 1990 and refers to Oakland rape cases from the previous year. The FBI report I linked to is from 1999 and refers to national statistics.
Now, the document itself was published in 2001, so perhaps the FBI and law enforcement agencies across the nation did not learn from these mistakes by 1999. One hesitates to speculate.
It is important, I feel, to note that this side discussion has little if any bearing on our previous discussion about what constitutes "valid consent," which we clearly disagree on. This does not resolve that disagreement, and I don't think resolution is likely otherwise. I won't beat a dead horse; anyone who wants to can read the thread to understand my position, whether they agree or don't.
I'll only reiterate my opinion that it's been a good discussion, with strong arguments from various positions about an important topic.
So, What's the deal with this Mothership I've been hearing about? Is it some sort of hero unit?
From what I've seen, the Protoss Mothership is some kind of ultra-unit. It would be high up the tech tree and cost a lot of resources, and you would be limited to just one at a time. I'd imagine Zerg and Terran will have ultra-units of their own.
I used the search and found nothing about this movie, much to my surprise considering the hate it's getting on some of the moviegoer review forums.
Here's what I thought:
I'm not at all surprised to see so many people down on this film. It's simply too complex for the average moviegoer. It's also being mismarketed as some kind of sci-fi horror thing, which it's not. It's psychological character-driven dark comedy. I blame that on the studio though, not the film.
Not that it's in any way confusing, but the relationship between lonely, tormented Agnes (Ashley Judd, who lets it all hang out) and eccentric, jumpy Peter (Michael Shannon, plays freaky like he's not playing) is so intimately real, even when it's plainly not. (I can't explain too much without blowing the story.)
Set almost entirely in a motel room, we have only the two main characters to drive the story. What that story is, is a sick tale of love between two people who have shut out the rest of the world, emotionally then - eventually - literally, as they try to escape the demons of their past, and deal with the bugs of their present.
Harry Connick, Jr. is Agnes' recently-paroled, abusive ex-husband. Lynn Collins is R.C., apparently her only friend, and is ostensibly the one sane person to set fott in the apartment. Brian O'Byrne has a small but important role that I won't spoil. All three turn in strong performances and propel the story forward with the little screen time they are allowed.
The squeamish will want to avoid this movie. There is a scene that makes some of the idiotic gore in movies like Hostel seem downright cartoonish. It makes perfect sense to the plot, though; in fact, as awful as it is, you understand exactly why it happens. Actually as a whole, as freaky as this movie gets, the truth of the characters keeps it grounded. That is, their background leads logically to their behavior, bizarre though it may seem.
"Bug" is intense, daring, and terrifying in ways you might not expect going in. If you think you can handle it - that is, if you are up to the challenge - absolutely you must see this film. If you want spoon-fed gratuitous schlock, you probably want to skip it.
Anyone else see it? What did you think? (Don't worry I won't freak out if you hated it. You're allowed to be wrong. ;)).
[p.s. - If that box is too big will someone let me know please? I use a widescreen monitor so I tried to make it small enough for regular screens. Or a mod can fix it for me, whichever. Thankya.]
I used to drink something like 3 cans of Pepsi a day, till I figured out it was making my physically ill, so I gave up all soda cold turkey. A couple years later I read this article and was glad.
Now I mostly drink water and coffee (either black or with a little sugar), and occasionally orange juice. As for alcoholic, either beer or screwdrivers (with Stoli, preferably).
I did break my rule the other day for a Black Cherry soda. That was tasty.
I wonder if you read the comments accompanying that article? Many of the "facts" stated therein are questionable. Not that I'd ever recommend soda pop as your primary source of hydration (I get by on 1 a day).
I drink a lot of green tea; lightly sweetened iced tea as the weather warms up; lots of water (I live in Tucson, Arizona); and various beers.
But.
Wish You Were Here from Pink Floyd is gorgeous from start to finish, and the title track is probably the most honestly heartbreaking ode to lost a friend ever written.
I suppose you could make a case for The Three Musketeers, but you'll have no trouble getting support for the other.
Is this a poll?
The difference? Mere intercourse was excepted by the state's "Romeo and Juliet" law, and would have resulted in a 1-year sentence for a misdemeanor, and would not have required him to register for the rest of his life as a sex offender.
Now, Georgia's "Romeo and Juliet" law has been amended to except oral sex as well, in large part due to the outcry over Genarlow Wilson's situation. Sadly, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the law could not be retroactively applied to his case.
The tragedy is not that this young man is being punished for a dumb decision, but the severity of the punishment and the illogic with which it was applied. Even the jurors in the case expressed dismay when they learned after their decision that the sentence would be ten years in prison.
The careless mistake of allowing a girl to give oral sex instead of just "giving it to her proper" has made the difference between a misdemeanor (and almost certainly probation rather than prison for at least half the one-year sentence) and the complete derailing of an otherwise-promising young scholar-athlete's life with a felony conviction, ten years in prison, and lifetime registration as a sex offender.
How has justice been served? It has not.
BONUS:
Just last night? Wowie. Until just now, I thought I was the most
heartlessforgiving person I knew. Well done.No offense, but you have completely missed the point of Grindhouse. They didn't "mock the 60's and 70's style of movie," they paid homage to a specific type of violence exploitation flick. In those old movies, the production values were so low it didn't matter if there were logical inconsistencies or -- for that matter -- missing or out-of-order reels. It just mattered that there was action, violence, and maybe a little sex. The Grindhouse movies are intended to be ridiculous, hyper-aggressive, trash art, and they succeed spectacularly.
Anyway...
In Spiderman 3, when Flint Marko and everything on him is turned into sand in the demolecularizer, the locket with his daughter's picture is unaffected. Why?
Oh, and howzacome in War of the Worlds (the recent remake) after the aliens jack up all the electric and electronic machinery, there's a dude with a working camcorder recording the tripod coming up outta the ground. Huh?
Makes me crazy.
Funny thing is, her sentence was even reduced to 23 days, three of which she was already through. Poor dear...
I believe you misunderstand. I mentioned it only because the original statement which prompted my request for its source was that the FBI had made the findings contained in the document. I wanted only to clarify that the conclusions drawn were not the FBI's. I meant to express no disagreement with the conclusions of the training manual; in fact, I think it is an excellent document and I hope it has been or will be widely adopted by law enforcement agencies.
As you imply, I am simply stating the obvious.
I do believe that the wide discrepancy supports my prior arguments regarding personal responsibility, though. It is the very fact that false allegations are made at all that makes eliminating ambiguity so important, in my view.
This does not make those statements factually accurate. O'Reilly's statement did not use specific numbers, but estimates which were further qualified with words like "perhaps," "about," and "potentially." He does not say which six-month period he is talking about. He cites a hypothetical example, not a specific case.
And these aren't counted among the malicious because they don't name an assailant. Are they not still false?
Thirty false allegations not including the 20 false allegations already discounted for some reason.
A woman believing she has been raped does not mean that she was raped.
Because a woman feels traumatized by her delusion, we should prosecute someone for it?
And all along, all I have been arguing is that the women in this 1.5% ought to: 1) take responsibility for their own behavior, if that's possible; and 2) not have their allegations prosecuted as though they were true.
So you are less hesitant than I. The example stated that Philadelphia's rate in 1998 was 18%, "twice the national average and the highest rate among the 10 largest cities in America." This to me indicates that the example given is the exception, rather than the rule. Perhaps the problem is systemic -- it certainly appears to have been so in previous decades -- but the example does not convince me that it continued to be in 1999. In fact it seems that many if not most of the country's law enforcement agencies had improved during the 90s. Others, like Philadelphia, had been lagging behind.
I have never suggested, nor heard it suggested by anyone to whom I would attribute credibility, that there is any "widespread 'common sense' belief that most rape allegations are false or unfounded." That is a ludicrous statement.
Further, I would point out that the fact that "rape allegations are categorized as unfounded four times more often than other crimes " is an official statement by the FBI, not one of the many other law enforcement agencies whose numbers are believed to be inflated. Is the "four times" estimate accurate? That is, did the FBI account for their findings about improperly unfounded allegations in that estimate? I don't know, though I have already expressed my willingness to stipulate ("for the sake of argument")that it does not, and that the actual number of unfounded allegations is in line with unfounded reports of other crimes.
So, confident though you may be in your speculation, in my estimation you are simply drawing conclusions that are not supported by the facts. As for me, I choose to not jump to conclusions. Hence, "one hesitates to speculate."
Sorry, I was speaking from the perspective of the question of valid consent being an ethical distinction, not a legal one. It seemed to me that the technical aspects were brought into the conversation when you asserted that the FBI had made a certain finding -- which I didn't see as particularly relevant but requested validation of anyway -- which then led to this side discussion about whether statistics have been appropriately reported. Other than the O'Reilly quote, there is little that applies to the ethical questions of what is or isn't valid consent. If you saw the prior discussion differently, that's your prerogative, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you, knowing your perspective.
I certainly would not disagree with that. In fact it's the underlying reason why I consider the ethical questions so important. It is because of unfounded allegations that the criminal justice system seems to be prejudiced against accusers.
It is, in America, the burden of the prosecution to prove that a crime has occurred -- not that something occurred, not that the accuser believes that something occurred, but that an actual crime has occurred and, further, that the crime was committed by the accused person. False allegations -- whether fabricated, imagined, coerced, inaccurate, or the result of misunderstanding -- corrupt the process.
My argument continues to be that people ought to be responsible for their parts in mitigating this corruption, by taking responsibility for their own behavior and eliminating ambiguity as much as possible. For specifics, I refer you to my previous posts in this thread.
I concur. May I presume that is you? You photograph well. But don't expect your handsome face to sway my positions.
Report" guidelines of that agency, but rather a training document developed by The National Center for Women and Policing ( http://www.womenandpolicing.org/. The conclusions therein are their own, not the FBI's.
As for the statistics, it seems the logical conclusion is that the statistics can be unreliable.
A couple of points:
Now, the document itself was published in 2001, so perhaps the FBI and law enforcement agencies across the nation did not learn from these mistakes by 1999. One hesitates to speculate.
It is important, I feel, to note that this side discussion has little if any bearing on our previous discussion about what constitutes "valid consent," which we clearly disagree on. This does not resolve that disagreement, and I don't think resolution is likely otherwise. I won't beat a dead horse; anyone who wants to can read the thread to understand my position, whether they agree or don't.
I'll only reiterate my opinion that it's been a good discussion, with strong arguments from various positions about an important topic.
From what I've seen, the Protoss Mothership is some kind of ultra-unit. It would be high up the tech tree and cost a lot of resources, and you would be limited to just one at a time. I'd imagine Zerg and Terran will have ultra-units of their own.
Here's what I thought:
Not that it's in any way confusing, but the relationship between lonely, tormented Agnes (Ashley Judd, who lets it all hang out) and eccentric, jumpy Peter (Michael Shannon, plays freaky like he's not playing) is so intimately real, even when it's plainly not. (I can't explain too much without blowing the story.)
Set almost entirely in a motel room, we have only the two main characters to drive the story. What that story is, is a sick tale of love between two people who have shut out the rest of the world, emotionally then - eventually - literally, as they try to escape the demons of their past, and deal with the bugs of their present.
Harry Connick, Jr. is Agnes' recently-paroled, abusive ex-husband. Lynn Collins is R.C., apparently her only friend, and is ostensibly the one sane person to set fott in the apartment. Brian O'Byrne has a small but important role that I won't spoil. All three turn in strong performances and propel the story forward with the little screen time they are allowed.
The squeamish will want to avoid this movie. There is a scene that makes some of the idiotic gore in movies like Hostel seem downright cartoonish. It makes perfect sense to the plot, though; in fact, as awful as it is, you understand exactly why it happens. Actually as a whole, as freaky as this movie gets, the truth of the characters keeps it grounded. That is, their background leads logically to their behavior, bizarre though it may seem.
"Bug" is intense, daring, and terrifying in ways you might not expect going in. If you think you can handle it - that is, if you are up to the challenge - absolutely you must see this film. If you want spoon-fed gratuitous schlock, you probably want to skip it.
Anyone else see it? What did you think? (Don't worry I won't freak out if you hated it. You're allowed to be wrong. ;)).
[p.s. - If that box is too big will someone let me know please? I use a widescreen monitor so I tried to make it small enough for regular screens. Or a mod can fix it for me, whichever. Thankya.]
I wonder if you read the comments accompanying that article? Many of the "facts" stated therein are questionable. Not that I'd ever recommend soda pop as your primary source of hydration (I get by on 1 a day).
I drink a lot of green tea; lightly sweetened iced tea as the weather warms up; lots of water (I live in Tucson, Arizona); and various beers.