Posts by dyan campbell
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No. The question is "is it reasonably possible that she provided consent for this sexual encounter?" It is a decidedly different question.
Fair enough. Although I'm unsure of how date rape, or rape within a relationship could ever get prosecuted then.
The whole thing give me the heeby jeebies because it shows me how vulnerable rape victims are to the attitudes of others.This is exactly what I was trying to express, thank you Tess.
As to what happened in this case, I have no idea. My basic idea is that there must be more than meets the eye, because I really don't see that a prosecutor would drop a case based only on prior statements made on-line of this nature.
You are probably correct Graeme, and I do hope so.
Having said that, I can recall some pretty outrageous decisions in rape cases. A friend of mine (in Canada) was the courtroom artist for BCTV, so she sat through many cases... there was one rapist who was acquitted - despite having 10 different complainants, who gave eyewitness accounts - because it was impossible to believe a handsome, young man (accompanied in court by his beautiful wife and cute toddler daughter) would have raped 10 older, less attractive women.
This was in the days before any DNA evidence. This guy used to climb (sometimes 12 -15 stories) high-rise apartments and let himself in open balcony doors.
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The question is not "Did she deep down want this sexual encounter?", it is "Did she provide consent for this sexual encounter?"
No. The question is "is it reasonably possible that she provided consent for this sexual encounter?" It is a decidedly different question.
Differently worded, but not really that different, Graeme.
There has been a great deal of discussion about Angus and his obtuse refusal to engage in real arguments, and this legal argument made by Graeme has been allowed to pass without comment.
I'm grateful to Emma for raising this, and to everyone else for pulling on the rubber gloves (as Craig so accurately puts it), required to argue with Angus. It is necessary if infuriating to fight with Angus and his type of the lunatic fringe.
But this point of legal weasel crap above...
how does this piece of legal phrasing differ from Angus's argument?If a someone makes a complaint, surely that's enough? Doesn't that complaint require investigation? How could anything suggest that is was "reasonably possible that she gave her consent" despite her assertions to the contrary?
Surely a legal argument that can be framed this way is exactly the same argument - given real power and used in a judicial process - that is presented by idiots like Angus?
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Although in this case, it's pretty clear that crime doesn't cause summer or full moons. So a correlation (if there is one) does actually suggest something noteworthy is going on.
Well, coming from Canada the correlation is pretty bloody obvious to me... freezing, driving rain and pitch dark... does anyone want to go out and commit crimes? Not really, they'd rather it was balmy, dry and not so dark... like perhaps a moonlit summer night?
There's a very funny passage in Lady Oracle, where the main character - a little girl who has been bullied by and left tied to a bridge by her fellow Brownies ("good knots" remarks her eventual rescuer) is worried that the town pervert will come by and expose himself. She doesn't realise, the narration goes, that any sensible flasher will be in some warm bus depot somewhere and not out exposing himself in the freezing Canadian winter night.
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Please excuse this if it has already been posted, but here is the quote of Margaret Atwood's with respect to the difference between science fiction and speculative fiction. She is far from dismissive of science fiction, and is herself unable to classify an author as either sci fi or speculative, and points out that Ray Bradbury (for instance) wrote books in both genres.
Margaret Atwood: I like exact labeling. Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see. We can do the lineage: Sci-fi descends from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds; speculative fiction descends from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Out of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea came Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, out of which came We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, then George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ray Bradbury’s Fahreneheit 451 was speculative fiction, while The Martian Chronicles was not.
Wired.com: But merges exist, aside from the historical designations.
Atwood: Well, there’s a crossover park where sci-fi and fantasy play together. But it’s really just a question of who is related to whom. If you could do a DNA of books, you could trace the classifications of these kinds of writing.
Wired.com: It seems that much of the blurring comes more from a lack of experience with these works, rather than some kind of postmodern sampling that erases points of reference.
Atwood: Right. People haven’t really read these books. They want to know where to put it on the bookstore shelf. When people first started writing this stuff, they didn’t call it science fiction. The first were called scientific romances. Before that, there were utopias and dystopias.
How can we classify some bizarre tales? That disturbing series of stories about civil servants in Russia by Gogol... like that one about a guy who wakes up and finds his own nose in the middle of the bread roll he's eating for breakfast...
Paul Litterick: come back! We readers out here are enjoying the debate... if not the acrimony... you guys really like each other right? If this were over cups of tea there might be much thumping of teaspoons, but we'd all be enjoying ourselves I think. Wouldn't we? I love these sorts of conversations... though having read very little fiction published after 1920 I haven't much to add...
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Latin America and South America aren't really synonymous, are they?
No, they can be really far apart... the distances are enormous. Cuba is a Caribbean nation near North America, Mexico is part of North America and Central America is comprised of: Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama.
My Grandfather was a survey engineer for the railways in the 1890s and took some amazing pictures of his travels through the areas.
One of the most interesting and poignant things he noted was the miles and miles of wooden boardwalks (in Caracas I think) built by the indigenous people, who were never allowed to set foot on the boardwalk they'd built, but had to walk on the muddy road with the horses.
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It's always interested me that we have this whole South American influence in Welly, just because somebody chartered a boat called "Cuba" to check out the site of Wellington in 1840.
You guys do know that Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean... about 700 or 800 km from South America.... right? It's not even Central America.
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More Chanel-ish if she had been shot in black and white, then..
No, it's more that any accompanying press is about her dress - or in the shots where she's not wearing their clothes - their handbags or sunglasses. So you get all these "paparazzi" shots where she's shopping - carrying Chanel handbag and shopping bags - dressed in Chanel on the red carpet etc.
Chanel would probably be only too happy to have Lily Allen perform in their outfits, but there would be carefully, specifically spelled out stipulations as to the prominence of their product in relation to her music - and I doubt that she would agree to let her music be overshadowed by the clothes.
But who knows? Things change - this is how the endorsement world would have worked years back, but who knows. And it depends on the product... Janis Joplin was seen so much with a bottle of Southern Comfort in her hand the company bought her a Lynx coat. Though that was far from an official endorsement deal.
But Chanel... there would be millions of dollars exchanging hands for the deal, not to mention the insane freebies she'd get, I think they would be very specific about how and when their product was showcased. One thing's for sure - she is not only going to be not wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on those clothes and accessories, she is going to become very rich being seen in them instead.
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Ngaire
I think I love your mother, just a little bit.
and Sacha
Your mum rocks, Dyan
Thanks - she was not only odd but also oddly inspired at entertaining children. She used to draw a rabbit for us as scratchy, airport bound toddlers and say "The rabbit's so thirsty I need you to draw him a water dish ... so hungry I need you to draw carrots and dandelions, so bored I need you to draw him a meadow with trees... as we got older our Dad got in on the act, and as soon as we had a grasp of an alphabet and numbers, he'd draw the rabbit on a graph and only show us for a second, and we'd have to guess coordinates to get the carrots and water to the poor thing.
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In Whistler Being Stoned in No Big Deal - that sure as hell is the best explaination for the sacrine sweet movie they play for tourist.
Is it this one by Douglas Coupland?
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It seems odd to me that pot is associated with tobacco, alcohol and inactivity, I come from (Vancouver) pot is everywhere and not taken terribly seriously. Last time we were back we saw some teenagers smoking a joint, and as a cop walked by they cupped their hand over it and smiled at him and he grinned and theatrically averted his eyes as he walked by them.
Marijuana tends to be the intoxicant of choice for the athletic, in Vancouver anyway. Most people who grew up there have skied, skateboarded, snowboarded or mountainbiked stoned. Most athletes I know would not have considered getting drunk or smoking cigarettes, as it would have damaged their performance, but all of them were total potheads.
In Whistler Being Stoned is No Big Deal
"British Columbia's known for its pot. Whistler is, too. But we'll be more on the map now for marijuana, that's for sure."
Depending on whom you ask, this province's marijuana crop is four to 12 times more potent than average weed. Much of it is grown in greenhouses, a practice that started in the '60s when U.S. draft-dodgers fled to Canada.
Mayor Hugh O'Reilly hired a public relations consultant to put the best possible spin on his city's notoriety.
"I don't think it's going to hurt the town at all," he said. "This is a resort town. We're going to get plenty of business anyway. This just helps."