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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jan 14, 2018 10:57:17 GMT -5
There's a reason that the word cantankerous goes hand in hand with old people. I think there's a major sense of entitlement there also. Old people seem to think they need to be respected and seen as wise for the simple fact that they had the fortune to get old. I say this as someone who just turned 50 and is perilously close to getting to the age of cantankerousness. Remember also that empathy (both cognitive and affective, though some rsearchers don't see as clear a difference) and foresight, the last capacities of the intellect to develop fully -- often not until one's late adolescence or early 20s -- are also the first to go in advanced age. Thus, the self-absorption, the inability to see another's point of view or to seem at all concerned with the needs of others we often see in adolescents and the elderly. Ask a a teenager or your older parent how either could engage in a risky behavior that are potentially life-threatening (driving recklessely; cruising to the bathroom without the walker) and you're likely to get the same answer: "I don't know?" Ask "Did you once consider how I would feel if you had been injured, or worse? Both your teenager and your parent are likely to say, "No, I didn't think about that." Nether your kid nor your parent is necessarily trying to be obstinate. They are what they are to paraphrase Bill Parcells. It's like complaining that your Neapolitan mastiff drools. Yep... he does. There's not much you can do for the older person; their capacity to feel for others or to predict possible outcomes will continue to diminish. With teenagers, instruction and patience will help. Dealing wiht these problems at the far ends of the spectrum is frustrating, though at lest there is hope that most teenagers will develop those capacities at some point. I suspect that it’s not so much a loss of empathy as an increased sense of “it does not really matter”. That attitude grows over time with the accrued emotional scabs that we inherit as we grow older. I remember my 16 year old moaning and moping about his then-girlfriend, and how she was the woman of his life and that no one understood the depths of his feelings. To which his parents and grandparents reacted apparently heartlessly, with a general attitude of “hey, kiddo, you’re only 16... You’ll get over it... Just be patient and it’ll get better”. Said attitude was not due to a lack of empathy, but to experience. The kid’s pain is all too real , but even if the grownups know it and acknowledge it intellectually, they know that in the long run it won’t matter. Experience doesn’t excuse callousness, of course, but it may explain why the older one gets, the less someone is likely to get oneself tied in a knot over what they perceive as pecadilloes. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 14, 2018 13:09:05 GMT -5
The common law definition of a battery is "a physical act that results in harmful or offensive contact with another's person without that person's consent." So essentially any unwanted touching. It's both a crime and a tort. This isn't something that has come up in recent memory. This is derived from a thousand years of English common law. What it boils down too is...keep your damn hands to yourself. That is sound advice. On the othe hand (no pun intended)... “Offensive contact” strikes me as a pretty vague and elastic term. Does eye contact count? Can a KKK member claim to be offended because a Haitian tapped his shoulder to ask something? Can a Brahmin claim to be harmed because the shadow of a Dalit touched his food? What about a hardcore salafist who is forced to come in contact with a woman on the subway? Doesn’t intent come into play at any time in there? Mustn’t we prove the intention to cause harm? Unless we establish objective criteria to what constitutes “offensive contact”, I see us as opening a Pandora’s box full of increasingly sensitive claims to actionable offense. As a citizen, I don’t like that one bit. What does society have to gain from it? (I can also see how an increasingly sensitive interpretation of such laws will push a large part of voters with centrist views to the right, and help keep people like Trump in power for a long, long time). Our own Crying Prime Minister had to offer apologies for accidentally hitting someone with his elbow while pulling at someone else’s sleeve. No joke, that was seen by the oppositon as “violence against women”. Just to show that the future dystopia may be inspired by Kafka as much as by Orwell. As for Stan Lee, I’m all for the truth to come out and for people in a position of power to be held accountable for their acts. I just have a hard time believing that a 90+ years old man can force anyone to sit on his lap and start kissing them. Acting and talking like a lecherous old relic, yeah, that I can believe. The answer to which is “Mr. Lee, that’s no way to talk and to behave. You owe me an apology”. Not “I’ll sue!” Offensive contact has worked as a legal threshold for hundreds of years dating back to the English Common Law and well before the U.S. or Canada existed. Nope. Eye contact doesn't count...no touching. The KKK guy...maybe. Shadows don't count...no touching. Unintentional touching on a crowded subway...nope. And yes, intent matters. The touching has to be intentional, not accidental (though Australia apparently has a negligent battery). And it's not a subjective standard. The standard is whether a reasonable person would be offended. Which is why the KKK guy is a maybe. Would a reasonable person be offended...maybe. Maybe not. Which is why it's a good idea to keep your damn hands to yourself. Criminal batteries (as opposed to the tort of battery) also are filtered through police and proprietorial discretion...for whatever good those may be. As to the Prime Minister...political expediency is a completely different thing than legal standards. I'm quite sure the opposition gave exactly zero shits about him elbowing someone as a practical matter and embraced it for purely political reasons. Nothing really to be done about that other than not electing petty wankers. Though it seems the polite thing to apologize for accidentally elbowing someone. |
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jan 14, 2018 16:55:05 GMT -5
As to the Prime Minister...political expediency is a completely different thing than legal standards. I'm quite sure the opposition gave exactly zero shits about him elbowing someone as a practical matter and embraced it for purely political reasons. Absolutely; it is politically expedient to make an accidental (and light) elbowing as an assault, and it is politically expedient to pretend to be so terribly sorry about it as to do a public mea culpa. Still, expediency or not, we have reached a point where it is possible to use such a non-event to score political points without being laughed out of the Chamber of Commons. |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Jan 16, 2018 19:10:58 GMT -5
The incident with Aziz Ansari is definitely what I had in mind when I voiced concerns about #Metoo the other day. There are so many people calling the guy a hypocrite for supporting Timesup because he's a perpetrator of sexual assault...but reading the woman's account of the date in the article I don't see assault or harassment there. He pointed to his junk and implied that she perform sex acts on him in the privacy of his own home that she entered of her own free will after a date...he didn't force himself into her mouth or anything like that so it's not assault and it's not sexual harassment either as it was a one night deal not a pattern of behavior and there were no consequences for the woman in question if she refused to do said sex acts and yet he's getting lumped in with the like of Weinstein and Cosby. And the answer to why Aziz should be put in the spot light like this is just as confusing, as many supporters say that yeah, what happened wasn't illegal but it's a type of behavior that needs to be addressed and discussed. Now, I'm not opposed to discussing boundaries but why drag someone through the mud to do it? |
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Post by Randle-El on Jan 16, 2018 23:49:55 GMT -5
I had a thought the other day in regards to the recent string of sexual assault/harassment allegations among show business people that I keep coming back to. As a disclaimer, I should make it clear that I consider myself fairly centrist from a political/cultural standpoint, with some views that would be considered conservative and others that might be considered more liberal, so I don't necessarily have an ax to grind with the left or the right. But I think it's fairly safe to say that Hollywood is considered a pretty liberal place by most standards. But I have always thought that there were two camps that were rather strange bedfellows (no pun intended) -- those with libertine attitudes towards sexuality, and feminists. On the one hand you have people like Hugh Hefner, and on the other hand you have feminists who *hate* Hugh Hefner. Of course, there's some overlap between those groups, but from my viewpoint it seems that the trajectories of both camps will always end up conflicting with each other. What I find interesting is how these two camps are coming into conflict in an industry like Hollywood. Hollywood, a place that was built on (and continues to profit from) the objectification and commodification of women, that also increasingly wants to be known as a place that is on "the right side of history" and values diversity. I have a hard time seeing how the two can coexist. It's like the irresistible force versus the immovable object.
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Post by Icctrombone on Jan 24, 2018 22:33:12 GMT -5
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jan 25, 2018 6:58:05 GMT -5
Regarding the “someone put something in my drink” accusation... One thing that is made very clear each year when my class visits the state’s forensics lab is that the one true rape drug is called... “alcohol”. GHB, which is usually the one people think of when such a drug is mentionned, has basically the same effects as booze. It causes short-term memory loss, sure, but in terms of making one forget their inhibitions or making them more compliant to sexual suggestions, it’s pretty much the same thing as too much drink. (Government pamphlets claim that it turns folks into sex-craving animals, but that’s a gross oversimplification meant to dissuade people from using it). Our population up here might be small (only seven million people) and is not representative of what may happen all over the world*, but of all the possible cases of GHB-spiked drinks analyzed by the lab (which is “all of them”) the number that turned out to actually involve GHB reached the grand total of zero. The only cases of GHB used in a nefarious context (rather than a recreational one, which remains the main reason people use the stuff) were in disturbing family contexts. So the drug is indeed used to make people forget evil acts performed on them... just not as often as urban wisdom would have it, and rarely in bars. I have no opinion on this particular accusation against Copperfield, but I do know that the GHB card is played way too often. An underage person having had too much to drink (which is illegal to begin with) is as easy to manipulate as one having had GHB, and if Copperfield really wanted to sleep with the lady, it was much easier for him to call for another bottle than to slip an illegal drug into her glass. (Not that I condone getting kids to drink too much to abuse them later, naturally). * or maybe we are pretty typical after all. |
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Post by Icctrombone on Jan 25, 2018 10:18:26 GMT -5
It's not what you know, It's what you can prove. That's being lost in all this feeding frenzy of accusations.
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Post by Rob Allen on Jan 25, 2018 11:55:15 GMT -5
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Post by Icctrombone on Jan 25, 2018 13:31:11 GMT -5
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Post by Icctrombone on Jan 26, 2018 9:52:50 GMT -5
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Post by Icctrombone on Jan 27, 2018 20:22:28 GMT -5
Nicole Eggert from Baywatch and Charles in Charge fame accuses Scott Baio of molesting her when she was underage. Then and now  |
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Post by Icctrombone on Feb 19, 2018 9:14:09 GMT -5
Megyn Kelly looks anorexic on TV. I'm watching her show and she seems about 50 pounds less than how I remember her.
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Post by Icctrombone on Feb 26, 2018 6:46:23 GMT -5
Kevin Smith had a massive heart attack while doing his standup routine last night. He is alive and recovering in a LA hospital.
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Post by Icctrombone on Feb 26, 2018 21:07:13 GMT -5
Heather Locklear arrested for domestic violence and attacking cops.
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