Phi for All

"One incident is one too many" is how you defend the men in these highly uncommon instances, but for the myriad of women who've gone through being assaulted all you want is fair justice. They need more from all of us.

NO! That's a rhetorical bandaid for YOU and other men who've felt wronged by women in the past. This is about the women, and the unfair challenges they face in assault cases with men. Yet you want to squash the one movement that's trying to do just that, because you want to be clear about you being fair and not being a rapist.

This seems like the stance of a man who has good intentions wrt women, someone who would never assault a woman, and desperately wants NOT to be lumped in with the rapists. But why would you think that "believing women" somehow means innocent-until-proven-guilty no longer applies? The problem NOW is that many cases don't start from "the middle", or a neutral clean slate. Do you think what a woman is wearing is any defense against rape, or how late it was, or that she didn't say NO enough times? That's where the defense usually starts from, which is the "middle" you seem to be defending.

And that doesn't happen in these cases because the presumptions are often that the woman was dressed in a certain way, or had been drinking, or somehow hadn't made her wish not to be raped clear enough. What "believe women" means is to remove this bullshit and start from "no presumptions whatsoever are made". And as in any case that goes to court, you start with the premise that the accuser is going to tell the truth in a court of law.

Because you aren't being intellectually honest with your argument. You've perverted the idea that we should start by believing accusers into "believe them 100% without doubt". Then you and others piled on with anecdotes from the radio where this perverted argument was repeated, claiming it's only what you've heard. It's pretty sick because once again you're making it harder for victims to get justice from a level field.

! Moderator Note I'm going to steer you away from conspiracy arguments really early here. We don't like them, because science. And please don't make slurs against large groups of people, we don't care for that either. You have a couple more posts on your first day before the anti-spam measures kick in.

! Moderator Note It's not a proper speculation if you don't bother to search for supportive evidence. It's a WAG, and not what we're looking for. Pony up, or this gets shut down quick.

Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/

I don't think it makes sense to bury anything of value with its former owner in a society that has so little. Were they appeasing the spirits of their ancestors, or possibly a superstition had grown up around using things that belonged to someone unlucky enough to die?

Oh, me too.

... and then you agonized about how to stop it because it's inevitable. Oh, and you pointed out several times how LOGICAL this all was. I don't think you think about what you write before you write it. That's how fear works, in a way. Because you wrote this: swansont corrected your physics misconceptions. It was YOUR JOB to relate that to your fears, not his. Why doesn't it make a difference to you that you've misunderstood so many things? Why do you persist on imaging the worst?

Of course! Hopefully you feel the site has become better since you joined over a decade ago, and if you stay it should continue to improve.

I don't LOL that often lately, but this struck a chord. I got the part of a newscaster in a high school play because I used my incredibly accurate Ted Baxter impression. Years later I tried out for the voice of the judge in a local production of Twelve Angry Men and my Judge Smails was less well received.

Or you can assume this is exactly what happens in each applicable instance. I don't want any more paperwork to do. Remember we're already spending the time backstage discussing whether someone is just venting and do they use fallacies a lot? and that's not very civil and they need to answer the questions and is this a sockpuppet? and that's bad science and wow that's a sneaky way of getting your homework answered.

If you put a potato in your trousers, you may not need the phone. -- Groucho Marx, I think

Because without that paralyzing fear, comprehension could just all of a sudden strike a person, and they'd have to completely change for the better. Good heavens, man, what a suggestion!

I understand. I'm perhaps overly sensitive to the concept of working against one's best interests lately. People I know have been duped since Reagan into thinking taxpayer help for the billionaires will help the working and middle classes. None of them understand why I think they're patsies to believe the wealthy need so much help.

May arise?! The opportunities happen every day. It's always a temptation when it seems so efficient (I see the spider, capture it, and toss it out of the house), and I know my intentions are good, but we all know how fallible we are alone. Most of our rules don't require us to separate these roles. We've reduced the number of judgement calls significantly over the years. In some instances, we even feel free to participate in threads we've moderated (for instance, if a thread needed to be moved to a different section). In most cases though, we try to keep moderation and participation in discussion separate. In very few instances are mods allowed to call out an infraction and punish it all on their own. We do that if we get a drive-by troll, or if somebody flips out during an off time, but most times when we ban or suspend or even give a warning point there have been 3-4 staff members conferring about it behind the scenes. Honestly, I think some folks get bent out of shape here because they don't understand their own ideas enough to recognize the difference between the membership scientifically refuting it and being told (again) that it simply won't work. The leeway our rules give us helps compensate for that, I think.

Of course the counter to that is that mom & pop were barely making ends meet because minimum wage workers couldn't afford to eat at their place. Raise the wages and more people have the power to participate in their own economy. Yet mom & pop regularly vote down wage increases, hoping for new blood from old turnips. If US healthcare costs were more aligned with the rest of the world, people would have even more disposable income. I've long felt that part of the reason why we won't even vote to give our own children better healthcare, education, and wage opportunities is because SOME folks don't think everyone deserves it. They'll cut off their own noses to keep immigrants and other undesirables from benefiting from public largess.

The idea isn't irrational. The way you torture yourself by focusing on this explanation alone is irrational. The way you phrase it, you're creating a problem in such a way that it can't be resolved. You're an unending skeptic, which is NOT the way to be in science. Either decide one way or the other based on the preponderance of evidence, or simply admit you can't know. You're in a loop of illogic. You've painted yourself into a corner with no escape. You're doing all this to yourself.

Yours is an irrational stance, so I was trying to help in a like manner. I have nothing more constructive to offer you, other than sympathy.

Write a note to yourself that says, "Eternal recurrence is NOT TRUE!", and put it in your pocket. Check your pocket the next day, and if it's still there, you'll know it's not a false statement, because if it was, you would have found that in your pocket the last iteration of the universe. You didn't, so eternal recurrence is not a fact.

The last study I read showed that, in the fast food industry at least, an increase to $15/hr in wages equates to a 4% increase, or an extra forty cents on your $10 combo meal. This would only come out of profit if not passed along to the consumer, so the business owners must have mistakenly convinced themselves that people won't pay it, or there's another reason for them to balk at a higher minimum wage. That industry has done it's best to reduce the training and intellectual requirements of the jobs they produce (remove the numbers from the register keys and replace them with pictures of the food, etc), in order hire more immigrants and young people, and I wonder if that hasn't given the average fast food business owner a jaded perception about what their workers deserve to be paid.

! Moderator Note Moved from Science News.

I can't help if you won't even listen to yourself. One minute you say it might not be true, the next you're convinced it's not. You are NOT behaving like a logical person. If I believed in hell, this is exactly what it would be like, the prisoners torturing themselves in their own minds over imagined sins with no real resolutions. I recommend you spend no more time there.