Julian Assange arrested (merged)

[Capt. Morgan]

Originally Posted by Dowly

Getting rid of Assange accomplishes nothing, someone else is going to continue but this time by keeping out of public. There's very little one can do about Wikileaks.

I agree that getting rid of him in an "accident" or disappearance would probably accomplish nothing.

Getting rid of him in some very public and horrible manor - as was the case in Alexander Litvinenko, sends a much more understandable message to any successors that may survive him.

[DarkFish]

Originally Posted by Capt. Morgan

Getting rid of him in some very public and horrible manor - as was the case in Alexander Litvinenko, sends a much more understandable message to any successors that may survive him.

And would be great PR to the US

[Catfish]

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/gl...aks/index.html

Just read it

[Skybird]

It is a "scandal" when the Government conceals things it is doing without any legitimate basis for that secrecy. Each and every document that is revealed by WikiLeaks which has been improperly classified -- whether because it's innocuous or because it is designed to hide wrongdoing -- is itself an improper act, a serious abuse of government secrecy powers. Because we're supposed to have an open government -- a democracy -- everything the Government does is presumptively public, and can be legitimately concealed only with compelling justifications. That's not just some lofty, abstract theory; it's central to having anything resembling "consent of the governed."

But we have completely abandoned that principle; we've reversed it. Now, everything the Government does is presumptively secret; only the most ceremonial and empty gestures are made public. That abuse of secrecy powers is vast, deliberate, pervasive, dangerous and destructive. That's the abuse that WikiLeaks is devoted to destroying, and which its harshest critics -- whether intended or not -- are helping to preserve. There are people who eagerly want that secrecy regime to continue

Good find, Catfish, in consistency with the editorial from the Swiss Die Wochenschau that I linked and translated yesterday.

[Molon Labe]

Originally Posted by Kazuaki Shimazaki II

...it is rather uncharitable for you to just assume the equivalent of "even if that agreement was made 10 years ago" was implied in my statement, is it not?

Anyway, once it became clear that I've got a fight on my hands, I've clarified on the position (it is on the last post of P.2) to say that a better position than a "No means No" party line is a compromise between commitment, momentum (forgot to write that explicitly last time so I add it here) and last but not least the need to allow for backouts, and that a good dividing line is about when you hit the bed. It is relatively late in the game (so IMO you can't say I've shafted the right to withdraw too severely), yet still early enough that you have time to think the issues through relatively rationally, and the point is clearly defined and easily recognizable.

My comments from the beginning have been aimed at something closer to consent being withdrawn sometime after "hitting the bed" than a situation where sex is agreed to 10 years before. So this clarification does not change my response.

If you pass that point deciding you want to go on, it is fair IMO to say you've committed nearly irreversibly, and also after that point, if we are talking successful sex, both sides' cognition will go down, and the effect of momentum will increase (as with any emotionally charged, rather physical event, but with the additional drag of all those hormones), so it is increasingly impractical to expect a rational decision to stop-on-request.
* * *
it is nearly impossible to separate consent and commitment - an explicit promise strengthens that commitment but is not essential for commitment to exist. When you agree / consent to do something, you are committed to it and obliged to carry it through.
* * *
Suppose I agree (I did not explicitly promise, let's say) to meet you at the park at 10AM. You will presumably adjust your life so you can be free to stand in the park at 10AM, waiting for me to show up. Unless you can honestly say that you won't be the least bit unhappy that I did not show up, or maybe I showed up for 5 minutes and then left, I think you see how consent and commitment are interlinked, even in the smallest things.
* * *
I agree that sex should be consensual in principle, however due to the reasons mentioned above, I don't agree it doesn't have to be committed to - it'll be an exception to the rule.

This is a key point so I want to dwell here for a moment.

It's this principle of "committment" that makes it seem to me (and probably Frau and Steve too) that you're on a different planet from the rest of us.

It's worth noting that committment, in particular when using the contract analogy, has a temporal component that consent does not have. Commitment means you have bound yourself to do something in the future; consent does not go past the here and now and does not involve any binding. Not only is it possible for a person consent to sex without committing him/herself to sex, but it is impossible to legally commit to sex because sex cannot be legally contracted for (not in most places, anyway).
So this legal/contractual concept of commitment obviously does not apply to sex.

Your argument about mental capacity could apply to a concept of commitment that is more physical than the legal concept--as one might say once you jump off a cliff you're committed to reaching the bottom. But this would only make sense if it was actually true that a person is physcially/mentally unable to stop once s/he "hits the bed." This is beyond absurd. To be clear, I'm allowing for common-sense reasons for a small delay, like reaction time, communication, involuntary motions at climax, etc. That's not what I'm talking about. Outside of a second or two for those, a person is most definitely still a person--not a machine or a falling rock--after s/he "hits the bed."

We can stop, we just don't want to. And once we "hit the bed," we really, really don't want to. And that brings me back to some of my very first remarks on this subject.

This isn't about "commitment," it's about "entitlement."

Substituting the concept of Entitlement for Commitment throughout your posts makes sense of what otherwise seems senseless:
1. (paraphrasing) After a pair hits the bed, they have momentum and are irreversibly committed to sex; a "right to withdraw" only exists before that point
--makes no sense because human beings can and do stop in the middle of sex
1a. After a pair hits the bed, stopping would leave them frustrated and unsatisfied, which may be intolerable for one of them because [he] feels [he] is entitled to [her] body/services and therefore ought not feel frustrated and unsatisfied.
--Immoral, but at least makes sense

Or take this example using a contracts analogy:
2. "In which case, a sudden withdrawal by one of the parties during execution is THEIR fault, and often requires the paying of some compensation. Certainly not making the party who was suddenly deprived of the benefits the bad guy."
--In this example (as applied to sex), [the male] has apparently acquired an entitlement, and is "wronged" by being denied sex. This entitlement is apparently so strong that not only is compensation due, but it can excuse the man for raping the woman, taking for himself what he is "entitled to" regardless of her pleas, and he is definitely not the "bad guy" for doing so!

3. "I'll say that if I were the magistrate or procurator, I will take into account that you have agreed to the fight and are in a weak position to protest thereafter, and that you had just tried to walk away scot-free....Any other decision would be to cheapen the value of commitment and to ignore the psychology of real fighting."
---In this example, though the person is physically capable of walking away and is therefore not committed to the fight, the person apparently has a moral obligation to see it through to the end. His adversary, because of the "psychology" of fighting, is capable of stopping but does not want to, and is entitled not to stop because his adversary has gone far enough to arouse those feelings in him.

It's much clearer now.

3) My point is that if compliance has to be immediate, even such a scenario (whether you think it is a setup or the man is just particularly unfortunate), would likely end in the rather wrongful imprisonment of the man, something which you seem to agree to be wrong and thus you are bringing up the actus reus and mens rea stuff.

While I'm not familiar with the Latin or the specifics here, I am aware of the general concept, and if I wanted them to come into play with certainty, I'll have specified something like 0.5 seconds.

2 seconds, depending on your point of view, can be quite a long time. Certainly in normal conditions it'll be quite enough to react to a simple command like "Stop" or "No". So if the judge buys that the man should be acquitted on grounds that he doesn't qualify for mens rea, he'll have to accept that the man's mental faculties aren't at their best due to what he's doing. And the decline in mental faculties during sex is one of the reasons why I oppose the current setup. The Requester may shout "Stop" on instinct in response to pain or fear, but the Recipient would have to apply logical thought processes in addition to fighting his own wave of emotions, all of which become increasingly difficult and unlikely as we approach the end.
* * *
Besides, your simplistic comparison fails to address the full consequence when law and society is factored. This law means that whenever Party A has sex with Party B, he runs the risk that he will fail to respond to a sudden, out of the blue request to stop while in a state of reduced mental capacity and thus have his life destroyed (between the prison sentence for rape, felony record and Sex Offender's registry & associated effect in societal status = effective destruction).

You might have noticed I hyperlinked the Wiki on each of those terms. This argument is a red herring because, as I stated earlier, the concepts of mens rea and actus reus are implicit in all Western criminal law. There is no need to change rape laws to account for this; it's already there. You're going after something much bigger.

It's abundantly clear at this point that you're not trying to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted for doing something that they had no control over, but that you're trying to make it so that a man need not abide by his partner's wishes, entitling him to his partner's body under the guise is "mental capacity" which itself is nothing more than his own sense of entitlement to sexual satisfaction.

it might be argued that such effective destruction of his life will do more harm than good. With this?

No, no, no.
Rapists have committed a severe offense and deserve to have their lives destroyed. As such, I consider the harm done to a rapist to be a good in itself. I'd even support moving rape+kidnapping into the realm of capital offenses, so you're barking up the wrong tree here.

For the setup of the scenario, I will note that:
1) Properly made law must be made with maximum possible measures to protect against misuse.
2) There's an old saying, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Since the current law, IMO, strongly favors players of this game, one must say the temptation is just about maximized.
* * *

I don't think the main point of my reply here was to advocate changing the point of no return (that was the job of the other paragraphs),so I think that this answer quite misses the point. Nevertheless, I'll say it is one of the advantages of my solution as well. Instead of both sides' having to prove you did or you did not utter a No sometime during the sex process, it is relatively simple to figure out whether you entered the room voluntarily.

That sound was my jaw hitting the floor.

First, I'll restate my point that in both "worlds," you need to determine the scope of consent. In other words, it's important to know what was consented to. In our world, the ongoing ability to say "No" will usually tell a person what the scope of consent is. In the consent-withdrawn rape world, scope apparently would be shown by the words and actions of the parties prior to "hitting the bed." Or so I thought.

Apparently I was horribly wrong, as it turns out that in your pro-rape world, consent to any sexual act creates a legal entitlement to every sexual act. Thus, once a person goes into a bedroom with another, either partner (or maybe just the man) has a blank check to do whatever [he] wants to the other. So a young woman "hits the bed" consenting to a make-out session and ends up being brutally raped in every orifice---and it's completely legal, because "it's relatively simple to figure out if [she] went into the room voluntarily."

Proof problem solved---by legalizing even more rape!

Since you're obviously fixated on the male point of view (being able to keep going when you feel like it, not having to worry about false accusations), maybe you could consider an "enlightened self-interest" argument. Assume for a moment, that the law is what you wish it to be, and once a woman goes into a bedroom with a man he can do whatever he pleases to her and she has no legal recourse. If you think the risk of a false accusation is so great that it gets you hopping mad, how bad would it be for women if they had absolutely no control aside from choosing a partner and a bedroom? Why would women in this world take the chance at all? Vibrators would seem like a much safer alternative... and all these "entitled" men would be getting laid a lot less!

While it fits the dictionary definition, may I take this opportunity to object to the common over-usage of the word rape? What happened to actually using fine gradations of diction. This overgeneralization makes the bottom end (like here) look worse than it is, and from overuse eventually suppresses the shock of the top end (like the stereotypical, violence filled variant) - neither effect is what we want.
* * *
First, do remember that the wrongfulness of "rape" is not in its letters, but in the actual amount of damage done, and quite frankly, it is hard to believe that a "rape" in this sense (emergency abort after consent) will have the same damage value as the typical damage done in the stereotypical high-violence variety - AFAIK, certainly the woman in Assange's example does not show signs of being severely damaged by the alleged experience.

It's not over-use! Forcibly having sex with someone who does not consent is rape! You think withdrawn consent means the rape is any less violent or any less a violation of her person and sovereignty?

In the instant case, it seems we're talking about a command to stop because the condom broke. Having an unwanted parasite growing inside you, using your body, feeding off your own blood, is about as extreme as a violation of personal sovereignty as possible.

In the case of pain being the reason for stopping, failure to obey the command to stop will result in ever-increasing pain, possibly physical damage. Inflicting this pain and damage in spite of desperate pleas to stop is incredibly violent.

Can you see past your own paranoia long enough to see that there are reasons to Safeword other than entrapment? Can you see past your own sense of entitlement far enough to see that everyone's body is their own property and they don't have to "give it away" to any extent that they don't want to, and by that virtue no matter what their reason, their right trumps your desire to keep going?

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by Molon Labe

That sound was my jaw hitting the floor.

Yours too, huh?

By that kind of reasoning, if I came to your home and you invited me in, I would have the right (by some kind of implied "contract" that exists only in my own imagination) to stay there as long as I wanted whether you continued to want me there or not. The fact that your home is undeniably yours, your personal space, your property, would be irrelevant. You consented to let me in, and now I'm entitled to stay there until the visit has been completed to my satisfaction.

And obviously that is nonsense. I'm not entitled to stay, because I was never entitled to be there in the first place. I have no right to be there, and you have every right not only to deny my initial entry but to request my immediate departure at any time thereafter. Having allowed the former does not negate your right to insist on the latter, nor does it give me the right to ignore it when you do. I am, and always was, there by your leave and your leave only. Once that has been withdrawn, I am a trespasser and nothing more. No amount of whining about implied "contracts" and "but you said I could come in!" is going to change that.

[Molon Labe]

Originally Posted by frau kaleun

And obviously that is nonsense. I'm not entitled to stay, because I was never entitled to be there in the first place. I have no right to be there, and you have every right not only to deny my initial entry but to request my immediate departure at any time thereafter. Having allowed the former does not negate your right to insist on the latter, nor does it give me the right to ignore it when you do. I am, and always was, there by your leave and your leave only. Once that has been withdrawn, I am a trespasser and nothing more. No amount of whining about implied "contracts" and "but you said I could come in!" is going to change that.

And what a dangerous world this is for those of us who might want to be guests on someone's property, that our hosts might ask us to leave and declare us to be trespassers before we are able to comply! The horror, that we might falsely be accused of being trespassers once having been caught in this trap!

Surely, it would be better for everyone if we abolished the right of the property owner to ask us to leave so that we would be safe in our knowledge that we could not be accused of trespassing once invited in, regardless of how we decided to use or abuse our hosts' hospitality once we're in!

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by Molon Labe

Surely, it would be better for everyone if we abolished the right of the property owner to ask us to leave so that we would be safe in our knowledge that we could not be accused of trespassing once invited in, regardless of how we decided to use or abuse our hosts' hospitality once we're in!

I'm kind of leaning in favor of the "contract" idea, as long as it's an actual contract - you know, one that is agreed to up front by both parties so that everybody (not just the party that the contract inevitably favors) knows how it's supposed to play out and what the consequences will be if it doesn't.

So when I showed up at your door and you opened it and invited me in, I'd let you know before I entered that I considered your invitation to constitute a binding agreement granting me access to your home for an indefinite period of time to be determined by me. And I'd also let you know what compensation I expected to receive should you decide to renege on that agreement at any time before I decided the indefinite period of time had expired. There, now that we're both clear on - if you'll just sign this - hey wait, what are you -

*slam*



Actually I'm even more interested in how this contract thing would work out in sexual encounters. Especially the compensation part. I've been pretty lucky lately, but in my younger years... I mean, if I had a nickel for every time some dude decided we were done before I was completely satisfied...

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by frau kaleun

Actually I'm even more interested in how this contract thing would work out in sexual encounters. Especially the compensation part. I've been pretty lucky lately, but in my younger years... I mean, if I had a nickel for every time some dude decided we were done before I was completely satisfied...

"Okay, I'll agree to number one, but number two is right out. Well, If you'll agree to try this, then I'll agree not to file suit if I don't like number four. Oh, and we have to be done by two-thirty, so I can get home in time to feed my cat. Okay, initial here and sign here."

Originally Posted by frau kaleun

I mean, if I had a nickel for every time some dude decided we were done before I was completely satisfied...

Euuuuu!!

Now I'm completely shaken'!
I think I know what the definition of reslut is now.

[Tchocky]

Originally Posted by frau kaleun

Actually I'm even more interested in how this contract thing would work out in sexual encounters. Especially the compensation part. I've been pretty lucky lately, but in my younger years... I mean, if I had a nickel for every time some dude decided we were done before I was completely satisfied...

Now pay particular attention to this first clause, because it's most important. There's the party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part. How do you like that, that's pretty neat eh?

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by privateer

Euuuuu!!

Now I'm completely shaken'!
I think I know what the definition of reslut is now.

To be fair it was really only one dude that didn't live up to the terms of the implied contract... there was just a whole lot of not living up to it (among other things) before I decided enough was enough. In fact I'm not even gonna add up all those nickels I missed out on, because the total would be far too depressing.

But it's okay, I iz much smarter now. S-M-R-T, smart! And at least I didn't marry the guy. So there's that.

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

"Okay, I'll agree to number one, but number two is right out. Well, If you'll agree to try this, then I'll agree not to file suit if I don't like number four. Oh, and we have to be done by two-thirty, so I can get home in time to feed my cat. Okay, initial here and sign here."

Well, aren't you a sweet-talking devil. I think you better dial down the romance a bit, I feel a swoon coming on.

That said, please notice the underlined, italicized, and bold-face section of the aforementioned document that stipulates absolutely NO AIR BASS PLAYING otherwise the whole deal is off.

Originally Posted by Tchocky

Now pay particular attention to this first clause, because it's most important. There's the party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part. How do you like that, that's pretty neat eh?

Pretty neat, although I think the sanity clause is going to put us all out of the running.

(Now if that's not a setup for a great comeback, I don't know what is. Aaaaand you're welcome.)

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by frau kaleun

if I had a nickel for every time some dude decided we were done before I was completely satisfied...

My doctor asked me if I suffered from Premature Ejaculation.

I told him, I don't; but my wife does.

<rimshot>

Thank you, you have been a great thread. I will be here all weekend.

Be sure to tip the veal and try the waitress.

[frau kaleun]

A man went to the doctor for his annual checkup. The doctor asked him if he had any medical complaints, and the man - somewhat bashfully - answered in the affirmative.

"Well then, what seems to be the problem?" the doctor asked.

The man quietly explained that the problems were of a rather intimate nature, and after much prompting, finally elaborated on the exact nature of his complaint. After many "hmms" and "ahas" and a thorough physical, the doctor excused himself from the room. When he returned he handed the man a sheet of paper.

"I've written down my diagnosis and some suggestions that might help you out," he said. "Make a followup appointment for one month from now and if things haven't improved we'll try something else." The man took the paper, read it over carefully, thanked the doctor, and dutifully made another appointment on his way out of the office.

Late one Friday afternoon a month later the doctor opened the door of the exam room to find the same man sitting there in full fancy dress - starched white shirt, elegant walking stick, and a black tuxedo complete with bow tie, cummerbund, tails and even a top hat.

"Good morning," the doctor said, all cool professionalism. "Have you been following the suggestions I gave you?"

"Yes, I have," the man replied. "But they haven't helped a bit."

"Well, that's too bad. But don't worry, there are other things we can try... therapy, medications..." At this the doctor paused and smiled. "But I see it hasn't interfered with your social life," he continued. "Looks like you've got a very special evening planned."

"No, nothing special," the man answered. "And my social life is crap. But I finally decided that if I was gonna be impotent, I was sure as hell gonna look impotent."

[Platapus]

A pun at maturity is fully groan.

News Flash: A crate load of Viagra has been stolen from a distribution warehouse - police are looking for hardened criminals.