WIP

Do you know anyone who chose to be black? Or any man who chose to be gay? And are there specific lifestyles to being black or being gay equivalent to the need to perform a public display such as in the OP? I don't know.....because wearing a leash is degrading, while kissing is not! There is such a thing as overdoing it with kissing in public, and we are more tolerant with some more than others when it comes to this....we tend to give teenagers a lot more slack with kissing in public than older folks. No thanks! And I don't think my wife of 25 years would allow it even if I was so inclined. On this subject though, I mentioned before that it seems that most doms are male, while most subs are female, but they both call it role-playing and decline to delve a little further into what it says about male/female relationships in general. Yesterday, I did a little searching around for some further information to see if there are any actual studies of the people in this bdsm subculture, but I couldn't find much of any value, but I did find in Wikipedia article a citation of one study...although it's from 1985....might be nice to have something a little more recent: A 1985 study suggests that only about 30% of participants in BDSM activities are females.[2][3] A 1995 study indicates that 89% of heterosexual females who are active in BDSM expressed a preference for a submissive-recipient role in sexual bondage, suggesting also a preference for a dominant male, and 71% of heterosexual males preferred a dominant-initiator role.[4] This would coincide with my suspicions that it mostly about something that men do to women....excepting the gay community of course! If 90% of the women play the sub role, that leaves only 10% of that already smaller group than men who are interested in being the femdoms you describe. That would explain to me why it seems that most men who want to get whipped or abused by a woman have to pay for it. Ever occur to you that not everyone is an office worker?

I still can't buy this line about the bdsm crowd being cast as some glorious rebels against society's rules. I'm more inclined to believe they (especially the doms and the sadists) are jaded, twisted misfits, who may mostly not causing real harm, but can't get off in normal ways, and have to keep creating more bizarre games to play. That one doesn't exactly fit some of the discussions that followed, but even with those two I have to wonder "what the hell!" And I'm not completely sure why, but I would still object to this sort of display going on in public. It's okay in the privacy of their own homes or in some bdsm club, but spare the rest of us unless the sub starts growing a tail. talk about your sick, twisted misfits in society! really! The Marquis de Sade is where we get the term - sadism from. The difference back then, was that it was only a small minority of idle rich who had the time to engage in this sort of thing.....but, since we are going back to a world where a handful of people control all the money, maybe his example suits the times after all! But, the rest of us will be too busy and too exhausted from overwork to keep up with the rising cost of living to be that bored that we can't get turned on unless we can come up with new ways to inflict pain on our victims.

And I'm glad those solutions are working so well right now!

And I guess the secret to your success is hocking Peter Pan peanut butter everywhere possible. I should mention that I only bought the natural peanut butter, not those kinds loaded up with salt, sugar and who knows what else!

I didn't have time to get around to joining in here when everyone was arguing about energy policy issues, but I want to add that no solution is going to work as long as we have an economy dependent on constant energy increase. I agree that nuclear contains some high risks....just ask the Japanese, who are going to have to live with the threat of losing half their country if there is another major earthquake that causes a collapse of damaged reactors and spent fuel containment pools at Fukushima. And, aside from the risks, nuclear is unreasonably costly...the money could be better spent elsewhere. I noticed that the two reactors that are clear for construction in Alabama are being underwritten by the State. But I don't hear all of the freeenterprizers complaining about big government in such cases.......only if they're building windmills and solar panels. I would say that if the big energy advocates are right, and wind and solar can't provide the constant baseload power to maintain the grid, then let the grid go down! Heck, most of the world these days doesn't have reliable 24/7 electricity, we're heading in that direction anyway with our constant demands for more power! After Fukushima, Japan had to shut down all of their nuclear plants temporarily. They had to rely more heavily on coal-fired power stations, but most of the power gap was met with an improved conservation program. If we consider that Japan was already way ahead of North America and even Europe when it comes to doing more with less energy demands, and has a roughly equivalent economy to the West, then that should tell us that Canada and the U.S. could cut a huge amount of the demand through conservation and shifting priorities and make the building of more power plants unnecessary. But first we would have to reform the way our media functions...which is supposed to be a public serve by the way, not a corporate propaganda mouthpiece! Nothing will happen in dealing with climate change until we take away the media megaphone of the oil, gas and coal companies first.

The only weather modification strategy that worked for China in the months before the 2008 Beijing Olympics was to shut down every factory for miles around the City and restrict auto traffic as well. China is another country that...if they're modifying the weather, it's producing disastrous results!

Because the Earth's average temperatures have been increasing right through a solar minimum period, which would have caused a cooling trend if the Sun was the main cause forcing temperatures up or down. And how is deforestation done? By cutting down and burning large areas of forest...which raises CO2 levels! First, some proof of mass scale weather modifications that would have a significant impact would help....and I don't mean the usual screwballs who appear on late night radio to sell books, gold stocks and survival gear. I haven't seen anything of substance behind the Air Force chem trail conspiracy theories, and if you're talking about the tests of cloud-seeding that were done from the 1960's into the 80's to end droughts and stop hurricanes -- they were either awash or made things worse, because weather is a complex system that reacts in unexpected ways. Weather control is the least of our worries, because it will never happen! It doesn't matter how much they learn about cloud-seeding and modelling the atmosphere, it's not going to work. If it did work, why aren't they doing it now in a time when storms are becoming more frequent and more damaging. Latest report from NOAA reveals that Hurricane Sandy was actually a category 3 hurricane in the Caribbean...stronger than originally believed; and even though it had fallen to tropical storm level just before landfall in New York/New Jersey, the record size of the storm caused record storm surges that did 50 billion dollars worth of damage....and that's just one storm! If someone is tinkering with the weather, why wouldn't they be using it to minimize storm damage, which combined with drought damage, may be the primary reason why the U.S. economy staggered and faltered rather than improving as expected last year. Do you realize that both of your links cite CO2 rising into the upper atmosphere as the most likely cause for the collapse of the thermosphere during that solar minimum period?

Sure thing. Those warm periods like the PETM or the Permian-Triassic Extinction was a very good thing! If it had continued longer, the mammal-like reptiles who make up our ancestral line 250 million years ago would have also gone extinct, and we wouldn't be around to worry about it. Does your upside down thinking make sense while you are writing it down? Because it sure doesn't look sensible afterwards. In more recent epochs it was the ice ages that spurred the flourishing of life on Earth, not those hot times when all the ice melted, tropic zones were virtually devoid of life, and even alligators were swimming in the Arctic Ocean to stay cool.

Which is exactly why we are paving the way for the extinction of the human race today! The technologies that have allowed us to over-exploit available resources have given us the illusion that nature bends to our will and supplies whatever we demand of it. In prehistoric times hunter/gatherers could only take what nature provided; even after agriculture began, farmers up till the middle of the 20th century had to be cognizant of maintaining topsoil, but mined phosphates combined with oil-based fertilizers created the illusion that farmers could do high yield monocropping year after year...even twice per season; and city folk...are pretty much a lost cause! City dwellers in general, have no awareness or concept of how much land and resources their cities require to sustain their developments. We didn't evolve out of it! All we have done over the last 150 odd years is learn how to use up non-renewable resources and overtax renewable resources - most crucially topsoil and water, beyond their carrying capacities. A study published for one of the UN agencies last year revealed that worldwide water use is doubling every 20 years! Much faster than population growth -- even combined with economic growth. This is happening largely because present agricultural systems were already unsustainable, and (especially as drought regions have expanded and droughts become more frequent and severe) irrigation for farming is growing at exponential levels. Another major factor rarely noticed is that mining and oil extraction is requiring more and more water as the years pass...simply because of the low hanging fruit principle with resource extraction -- the purest and closest to surface resources are exploited first, and as time goes on, the mining and oil companies have to keep digging and drilling deeper and deeper and using more and more water. So, just looking at renewables, what we are doing now is already exceeding the carrying capacity of what can be made available. Non-renewables will just gradually dwindle away over time, which is why it is always astonishing to me that there is no thought or consideration for leaving something for future generations that will inherit a world where NNR's are either used up, or what's available is too costly to make exploitation worthwhile. The constant...even exponential annual increases in atmospheric CO2 levels are telling us that we have broken natures' carbon cycle, that had been preventing CO2 levels from rising above 300 ppm for several hundreds of thousands of years. We hare almost at 400 today -- a level that will melt the world's sea ice, the Greenland icesheet, and leave the East Antarctic as the only major ice fields. Once Co2 levels rise above 450....which is already expected based on what we are pumping into the atmosphere along with positive feedback effects of melting permafrost and methane clathrates under the Arctic Ocean....then we will have plunged Planet Earth into one of those hot spikes that have previously been associated with mass extinctions like the Permian-Triassic. So much for "bending the environment!" In a few decades it will start bending back on us. Not all humanists act like evangelists-in-reverse like Richard Dawkins for example, but those like Dawkins, who feel such a strong need to create a world without religion have to present a naturalistic worldview as being able to replace everything that many people presently get from religion and various spiritual traditions. So, Dawkins has to create his own spirituality that he describes as being in awe of the universe - Aweism is actually what some followers are calling it. But, the added problem for naturalism is that to replace religion, it has to offer its own message of hope for the future; and what happens if the future looks dark and perilous? That's why I contend that the majority of active atheist writers, bloggers and secular humanist club organizers, are not rationalists when it comes to dealing with the future. They are hoping that somehow everything will work out fine, and what really grinds me is that very few are actually looking at the scale and scope of environmental and related resource problems that are already beginning to make their effects felt in many parts of the world today. I'm not sure what you mean by look to yourself! I might be able to keep myself and my family safe, but I can't save the world. This is a collective problem that requires a collective solution by getting people to shift their priorities away from rampant, wasteful consumption and save something for those who come after us. It's hard to get people to defer short term comforts for even their own long term needs, let alone the needs of people who haven't been born yet; but that is what will be needed to ensure survival of our species, along with many others that are already on the road to extinction.

Who said anything about classy? It's Murdoch Press, and it's not much different than the Toronto Sun, except the page 3 girls are topless! I wasn't browsing the SUN in the first place. The Sun came up in my search, and I noticed that sordid story on the sidebar. Yes, I know, it's the same with Daily Beast or Huffingtonpost. The problem boils down to the fact that most print and broadcast "journalism" is for profit - not to inform the public. But, I wasn't just talking about this S&M scene; there does seem to be an increase in extreme sex that is not always put in that category, but can cause injury nevertheless. Umm, did you ever see the old "under the counter" magazines that featured Betty Page? Calling that S&M is really stretching the definition of the term. I saw some of the pictures that my older brothers and some of their friends passed around.....compared to today, it hardly even qualifies as porn! It's more a matter of the 1950's being a time of extreme paranoia and social repression. Freud had an answer for everything....but that's because his psycho-analytic theories were unfalsifiable. Do women really suffer from penis-envy? Can't say I've talked to many women who wished they had one! On the other hand, an alternative freudian theory would be that men suffer from vagina-envy, and are fascinated and horrified by the whole birthing process. That theory might at least explain the rise of patriarchy, and the need to set rigid controls that included the death penalty, for when women can have sex, who they can have sex with, and how long they will keep procreating! I guess I'm not a fan!

That might have been an accurate point 50 years ago, but exactly what rigid social conventions are there to rebel against today? At least here in the west, where most of modern pop culture is based on hedonism today. I know there are exceptions, but I'm still betting most of this master/slave b.s. is guys who want or need control and women going along with it to keep them happy. In a world where women are often earning more than men, they need this sort of power to dominate and inflict pain on women to make themselves feel masculine.

I came across this story in the UK Sun yesterday in the right hand margin while looking up a different story. This is not the story I referred to that was local, where a man eventually killed his common-law wife through increasingly extreme games that became fatal....and she was branded with a tatoo of his name. Since this is in the SUN story, how common is this practice of sadistic or domineering men literally putting their stamp on their women? Anyway, here's some of the details: THE mum savagely beaten by her boyfriend in a sex slave game told last night how the fantasy was a “desperate attempt” to save their failing relationship. The woman, in her 40s, was left sobbing and with horrific six-inch bruises after Steven Lock whipped her 14 times with a knotted rope in a romp inspired by best-selling novel Fifty Shades Of Grey. Lock, 43, was last week cleared of causing actual bodily harm. But The Sun has discovered he has racked up SIX convictions against women including two for assault, one for assault occasioning ABH, harassment and twice breaching a restraining order. One led to six months in jail. Lock, a jeweller, escaped punishment after Ipswich Crown Court heard his now ex-partner had signed a contract to say she was his slave. She also had a tattoo above her genitalia that reads: “This is the property of Steven Lock”. Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4766077/Fifty-Shades-sex-slave-game-mum-savagely-beaten.html#ixzz2KoTNG8M8 In the followup story that informs us that Lock was cleared of all charges we learn: During the trial, Lock was asked by defence counsel Roger Thomson if he and the alleged victim had read Fifty Shades Of Grey. He replied: “That’s where we got the idea from.” Outside court, jeweller Mr Lock said he was relieved that the jury “had seen sense”. He said: “It’s the right verdict. This case should never have reached court. “As far as I’m concerned, it was a consensual activity between adults.” The court heard the couple took part in group sex and bondage together and the woman had the words “Property of Steven Lock” tattooed around her genitals. The woman also signed a contract promising Mr Lock free use of her body and entitling him to lash her if she did not follow his rules. Lock told the court the woman consented to the activity and the couple agreed on the code word “Red”, which was to be used if either of them began to feel uncomfortable. The woman, who told the court she broke down in tears and screamed as she was beaten 14 times with the rope, never used this word. Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4757579/Man-cleared-of-assault-after-bondage-sex-session.html#ixzz2KoU0RZ00 In the least, it should be a warning to women who've bought this Fifty Shades of Grey bullshit, to be careful what you agree to! Once it gets taken to extreme ends, it's your word against his, and a jury in this case agrees with the accused that she agreed to this extreme beating, rather than agree with her that he went way further than she had signed on for. I would have assumed that the extent of physical injury would have been all the proof needed, but that was not the case here, nor in the comment string, if you care to skim through some of the comments from SUN readers. Considering the source, I wouldn't expect alot from this crowd, but I would expected that even here you would find more on the victims's side than bitching because his name got published while her's was not. And it's not so much that most of them are complaining about his name being released prior to trial, they want the name of the victim published as some sort of public humiliation I suppose. If you have any wonders why I see civilization unwinding and regressing, a lot of it is right in these sorts of stories. Why is there such a fascination with these s&m games in the first place? Is modern life so bad that this is the only way people can get a rush - by pushing everything to further extremes? That's where the problem starts I would argue!

No I don't. The problem is that the believers in a cornucopia future - such as yourself, have an irrational faith in tech cures being pulled out like rabbits out of a magician's hat. And saving the future requires that human potential to defer short term benefits for long term gains. In this case, we're talking about very long term; since much of the warming in the world's oceans hasn't made its effects known here on land yet....but it will! So, is the human race willing to defer present resource exploitation (much if not most of it I would argue is causing more harm than good right now) in order to save the future for our species? My latest realization of the last couple of years is that atheists...especially those attached to conventional humanist ideology are irrational about some very important things today. They may not believe in supernatural forces, but they assume that the present path of growth, consumption and waste can just go on indefinitely in the future. Atheists who recognize how wrong some of those who have set themselves up as movement leaders are, are much less judgmental of those following faith-based beliefs. The human potential for destruction is the greatest human potential of all.

If I may interrupt this latest love fest, I still find it objectionable that you are still claiming that a false accusation of rape is equal to rape. You can argue for treating cases of false accusation more seriously without diminishing the impacts that rape have on the victim and those close to her...or him...sometimes happens too. The impact of false accusation are not equal or equivalent to: being physically injured during rape, contracting STD's including AIDS, and being threatened with death, and having to beg and/or negotiate to stay alive....as many rapists don't think through full consequences of their action and haven't thought through whether or not they need to kill their victims to avoid arrest. So, let's put more flesh on the bones of "it ought to be treated more seriously" and tell me whether you are arguing for more punitive actions for false accusation....which would include cases where the victim was unable to prove that they did not provide consent to the accused? Anyone who argues for that sort of approach is taking us right back to where we were 40 or 50 years ago, when very few rape incidents were reported, fewer went to court, and fewer still - rapists were prosecuted in court.

Yes, and we should also note that the public is complacent and largely disinterested because drone attacks are seen as something that happens over there. But that will all change as soon as Iran gets a bunch of drones, or starts building their own, and flies them over here to assassinate enemies on their list.

Maybe! But I can't figure out how this works! Is she actually enjoying being treated like a dog and walked on a leash? Part of my uneasiness comes from a feeling that a lot of young women are likely doing this stuff just because of pressure from their boyfriends. This sort of thing seems to have happened with the sudden growth in popularity of alternative sexual practices like anal intercourse. Until porn made anal sex conventional, it was just something that gay men did to each other. But thanks to all of the guys seeing it in mainstream porn, they want to do it to their wives and girlfriends. Are there really that many women who are masochists? Or is this another example of guys wanting to do stuff that they see in porn videos? I know that the sides can be reversed, and there are guys who are masochists and maybe some early childhood issues cause them to want to be whipped or spanked by a dominatrix. But, off hand, it seems like they usually have to pay for it, whereas any woman who is a masochist would have no trouble finding guys who want to domineering and at least somewhat sadistic. Maybe, but I am still left wondering about people who just can't get off on regular sexual relationships, and have to add all kinds of crazy role-playing, whips and ropes games to keep things interesting.

Don't we already have that now? Isn't it too much to bear for everyone, including atheists? If we're talking of a subconscious level, everyone is acting in denial...at least to some degree as they go through daily life with the awareness of their own mortality deep in the back of their mind. I'm thinking here primarily of some stuff I've read on Terror Management Theory -- first conceived by Ernst Becker and later developed into a psychological theory that is contested by some, but if it's well grounded, TMT could help explain just about every aspect of culture and human behaviour as the awareness of our mortality acts as the motivating force behind religious practice, legacy building, burial rituals and visiting grave sites of loved ones. An interesting Psychology Today article on TMT shows surprisingly, that people who exhibit the highest levels of anxiety about death also are more likely to be reckless and act aggressively, even having what looks like a death wish....almost the opposite of what would be expected. Some findings, such as high fear of death correlating with strong dislike and avoidance of animals, including dogs and cats seem to go together for some reason. And scrolling down Nathan Heflick's article to no.10) Defending one's belief prior to reminders of death lower death thoughts. I'm thinking that this applies more widely than someone being afraid of death and clinging to a belief in an afterlife, but also includes the atheist, who doesn't believe in life after death, feeling a strong need to prove his non-supernatural beliefs to others, to lower his own anxieties. Certainly reason matters! But, my point has been that most of our thinking is not based on reason and rationalizing choices. That just takes too long. According to dual process theory (that our reasoning and intuitive thinking systems work largely independently from different levels of brain function), most of our thinking is intuitive, so we can make quick decisions....mostly without even being consciously aware of them. The difference between those of us who are highly skeptical and adhere to a naturalist view of the world, is that at some point, as we determined that we live in the natural world, we began to suppress supernatural thoughts, so our practiced skepticism shuts down the life after death stories, and the psychics, and the holistic medicine claims etc. It's always possible that the skeptic may be screening out too much, so just in case, I wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone was skeptical atheist, in case we become overly skeptical and miss something unexpected. But, the big problem to me is that I don't find most secular humanist writers and lecturers all that rational about the state the world is in today. If they were, they would be advocating for drastic changes to the way we are governed and change economies based on increasing consumption.

I thought I was on the other thread based on the posts I was responding to!

I would wonder if someone is actively trying to degrade themselves, or are being coerced into this to keep a sadist happy. Some people have issues that would probably be better worked out with some kind of therapy than pushing them further. I also have heard of at least a couple of cases where girls went along with guys who wanted to play bdsm games, ended up dead, as their partner kept pushing the game to more and more extreme levels. One of the cases a few years back involved a young woman who had "Property Of" followed by her common-law husband's name tatooed on her...I forget where....doesn't matter anyway....she just didn't realize in time that it wasn't really a game to her husband, until it was too late!

Well, how many times have we heard "draining the swamp" tossed up as the analogy for combating the underlying conditions that feed terrorism and insurgencies! I would say that 'draining the swamp' is impossible as long as the U.S. is a colonial power that uses its military as its main tool for diplomacy and thinks it can "regime change" any dictators that step out of line. And how many new terrorists will these drone attacks create? Think about it for a second: you're living in northern Pakistan or southern Yemen....location isn't important....and then one day when you hear this buzzing noise that you've learned is the signature of a robot-guided plane up in the sky, a missile is fired that takes out your family as 'collateral damage' in an attack on a terrorist suspect that was on one of Obama's baseball cards that the President is presented on these 'terror tuesday' briefings....that were supposedly top secret....but leaked to the public without any consequences....unlike the leaks on corruption and use of torture, secret detentions, and deaths of suspects in those secret prisons, which were hunted down and prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Anyway, because President Obama happened to pick the baseball card of someone who may have only been in close proximity to your family, they're dead! So, what do you do? Jump up in the sky at them? Shoot any gun you might happen to have at them, in a futile attempt to take down one of the drones. It doesn't take a genius to figure out how people affected by this kind of 'collateral damage' can soon become next year's terrorist recruit! Psychologists....including many Israeli psychologists....who have profiled terrorists and terrorist suspects find the common features are feelings of loss of pride and futility. It's not that they're Muslim as all you Neocons try to paint as the picture. There were terrorists before Al Qaeda and Hamas came along....the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka may still have the record for all I know....it's using your life and your own body as the weapon against enemies and perceived enemies. Therefore, these drone attacks are the seeds that will sprout as future suicide bombers....unfortunately, it may occur further along in the future, as a new president will be blamed for it, rather than the one presently sitting in the White House, looking through his stacks of baseball cards for his next target! And, I want to mention before I forget it again, that every law and tactic that has been created with a specific group in mind, can be turned against anyone else in the future. So, now that the U.S. has created a situation where a president can be judge, jury and executioner on any American citizen....he doesn't have to have a beard and an Arab surname....will any American, regardless of where they live, be safe from this kind of tyranny?

I suppose, but I have to question whether deprogramming everyone who has supernatural beliefs and belongs to religions (almost all base core dogma on the supernatural) is best for them on balance. Doesn't it depend on what sort of religion they belong to, since most - aside from cults - make some compromises and adjustments to fit in better with mainstream thinking. And sometimes they adapt to harmful social conditions rather than trying to change them....I'm thinking in particular of the early Christian rejection of the ways of this world, to later mostly adopting nationalist and pre-existing race and ethnic discrimination, rather than have to do the hard work to challenge their converts to practice a more universal concern for others. I've mentioned previously that most churches - starting in America - made an abrupt shift in the Christian approach to economic theory when the gospel that comes from Matthew in particular - with Jesus frequently condemning the rich and the accumulation of wealth, and promising relief for the poor, is turned upside down in the 20th century in the prosperity gospel version, where the rich are wealthy because God is blessing them, while the poor are doing something wrong.....otherwise they wouldn't still be poor! I mention this because religions that coopt mainstream thinking as their own, may be doing more harm in general, than the religions that stubbornly resist changing their dogmas. As for the individual; I also want to mention that there is a built-in assumption that all minds are identical, having the same needs and ways of understanding and finding meaning in the world. I have a suspicion that the more evangelical wing of atheism is building it's own faith-based myth to try to attract those who have been deconverted, to tell them that they will be happier and satisfied with life as unbelievers. I've noticed that all of the most active atheist writers, lecturers and bloggers are all in the techno-optimist side of secular thought. There are atheists who look at what the human race is faced with today and believe that the hopeful optimism of tech-boosters....mostly arguing that....things are bad but we will innovate and substitute our way out future bottlenecks threatening extinction....is nothing more than faith-based belief itself. I can't count how many times Moore's Law has been thrown at me to argue that technological innovations are increasing at an ever-faster pace and that magic bullet - free energy machine is out there somewhere in the near future just waiting to come to market. But the reason Moore's Law applies so well to computer technology and almost nothing else, is because innovations that require very little increased energy inputs are easy to produce, while the cost of energy constrains every other proposed innovation. That's just one example of why I find what's called the Cornucopia view of the future to be delusionary optimism. A realistic look at the future does not look like we're paving the way for Star Trek, but that seems to be the mind set needed before an active, aggressive campaign to deconvert the religious makes any sense! If the future is dystopian, then all institutions, including government and religions are at risk of collapse, and that is more likely to incline the atheist with what's called pessimistic...but I would argue - the realistic look at the future to be more inclined to leave the religious believers alone as long as they have a grip on reality. They may need a faith that there is a God in charge of this universe, and a grand purpose behind it to get through the declines of the coming decades. And those of us who can't convince ourselves that there is a divine purpose in this universe, are stuck looking at a future that will either collapse quickly, or just keep slowly unwinding and grinding down. And that's the main reason why, unless I am pestered by some evangelical, or am talking to someone who has a real childish view of the world and/or a hostility to science, I am more inclined to just leave it alone.

What should be investigated is why Harper appointed a man young enough to spend the next 40 years of his life sitting in the Red Chamber. There were already allegations of domestic assault - police called, no charges filed if I recall - same with financial malfeasance. Harper was just hoping he would have a loud mouth attack dog on side who was an Indian....to provide some cover from allegations of racism and discrimination....and then the Brazman got his ass kicked by a Liberal! If he had kept a low profile, many of us who don't pay close attention wouldn't have even noticed. I forgot all about his charity boxing match with Justin Trudeau, and no wonder - the fight wasn't really given high profile in the more liberal mainstream media, and the Tory media started acting like it never happened....just as they are doing now with the Brazman! I took the channel block off of Sun News, just so I could check in and see if they have mentioned anything about Brazeau....and maybe those of you who watch that dreck regularly may have heard one of their propagandists say something, but in the days after the scandal broke, I couldn't find one mention of him any time that I checked in....it's like he vanished from right wing media that had hyped and overpromoted him in recent years. I can imagine that someone who actually depends on Sun and Canwest Global news media for all of their news, will be just as brainwashed as the mouth breathers south of the border who depend on FoxNews and right wing talk radio.

Yes, and I wanted to find out whether you were doing it consciously or just tone deaf to the impacts that an actual rape would have on someone's life. There are a number of subtle right wing reactionary strategies at work regarding many social issues. For example, banning abortion is scripted around protecting life; opponents to racial or gender quotas call them discriminatory, and give no credence to actual disparities in the workforce; opponents of feminism have contrived two separate forms of feminism: "gender feminism" and "equity feminism" to attack changes to employment or family law that they see as threatening. So, when someone comes on with an argument that rape and the accusation of rape are equal, I want to know where they coming from and how seriously they've thought it out before hand, or what their possible ideological sources are.

You set up a false equivalency between rape and the accusation of rape as being equal in terms of damage and consequences to the individual. And neither you or Bonam have defended that point very well, if at all! My point to both of you is that rape is a greater evil for a number of reasons already listed, and the possibility of a false accusation should not be used to shut down investigations or intimidate women into remaining silent. So, the police and the courts should take the charges seriously until they can determine that they are lacking evidence; while many cases of sexual assault do not leave conclusive physical evidence behind. Should a woman be more concerned about a harsh sentence (equal to committing rape in your system) than making sure that the rapist or sexual offender is charged, so that he doesn't repeat the same offenses again with other women? To me, the answer is obvious! False prosecution cannot be considered as serious or as damaging as actually being raped! That is just totally ridiculous. And most of the issues regarding the false rape accusation could be dealt with by preventing the media from publishing names and identities as soon as someone is charged. And this is no different than any other false accusation.

If someone lit a match, there would be enough straw men burning to set the whole forest on fire!