@Payback, @newtboy you're missing the point.

It doesn't matter if rape is worse than groping... we need to start drilling into people that neither is acceptable.

The sentence for these crimes is different and that's correct. (So no, a shoplifter isn't Bernie Madoff)

But as far as I know, none of the accused has been sentenced to anything.

But public shaming as a minimum? I'm fine with that.

And Aziz Ansari doesn't deny what happened, he's just "sorry she feels that way".

"Does this go both ways? If a man has a bad date, or bad sex..."
There's a difference between bad sex and being pressured into sex. Even if it's not rape, it's still not cool.

"I hope that girl you had a bad date with in high school doesn't come back to show you the error of your position by adding your name to the "me too" list, destroying your career, family life, and future with no recourse to prove your innocence...all because she didn't orgasm.....but I do hope you see the error."

If she came back said I was crap in bed, I would probably shrug and say "hey I was a teenage boy, they're all crap at sex". If she said, I pressured her into sex, I would deny it vigorously.

"Being weird is the same as being a rapist?!? Jesus fucking Christ, I always thought you were rational. "
Come on, newt, you know that's not what I said. I said "stop being weird, gropey or rapey". If I said "stop eating bacon, doughnuts or sugar", would you think I meant that bacon, doughnuts and sugar are the same?

First, I like weird people on a day to day basis. Second, there's nothing wrong with consensual weirdness.

But in context, it's pretty clear what I was talking about. But if you must have it spelt out, don't
- force people to watch you masturbate
- meet people (especially younger members of the opposite sex that work for you) in a dressing gown in your hotel room
- make sexually explicit remarks to strangers

But to reiterate, yes, there are degrees of violation. Rape is worse than groping and groping is worse than exposure. There, happy now?

Now that we're all agreed on that, can we focus on stopping the problem instead of this pointless grading of offences?

This really isn't difficult. If you can't tell whether another person is enthusiastic about sexual activity with you... maybe relationships aren't for you.

Should the child shoplifting the Mars bar go to prison with the Bernie Madoffs of the world?

Both are stealing, both aren't acceptable, both are sure as fuck not equal crimes. One needs the piece of shit put away for ever, the other needs counselling.

Saying that stealing is all bad and that only when shoplifting becomes a capital crime should we worry about the child facing the gas chamber, is ridiculous.

Well, thank you for the compliment, fellow masterdebater.
Or did you mean "masturbator"? Then I'd have to disagree, I'm certainly not bad at that.

Yeah, my post was super hyperbolic but it was just a continuation of the thinking going on here. I took it to the next level. The basic message I took from this thread was "Fuck that guy, he's an insurance scammer and got what he deserved!"
I disagree.
First of all, his crime (scamming people out of money) makes him a huge asshole and definately someone I wish not much well being in general. However, he was slowly run over by a car! You have to do some really awful shit to deserve that kind of punishment. If that man was the pope, I'd have applauded the lady and asked her for a re-run because the pope supports child rapists. If that man was Jeffrey Dahmer, I'd ask if I could have a go. But he's, as far as we know, neither a rapist or murderer or anything else as horrible. He could be dead. He could be a vegetable. He could be disabled. None of that is a punishment fitting his crime. Not even a Bernie Madoff deserves that.
The second thing is this whole "he did something stupid and now he got what he deserves" debate. Look, I'm a person of schadenfreude. I have sadistic personality traits that fill my shrivelled, black heart with gleeful joy everytime somebody gets hurt. But there are limits.
My examples are horrible and gross but what sets them apart from what this guy did is mainly they're not criminal activities. Sure, if you shoot at cops and get shot, you deserve that. You committed and act of agression and got pwned. That man was not agressive towards anyone.
He didn't lay under a moving car, he lay beside a standing car that then rolled over him while making a turn because the driver didn't notice him. Misjudgement on his part? Sure. The same as playing russian roulette or shooting at cops? Nope. That's because his activity, running into a standing or slowly moving car and pretending to be hit, doesn't include certain death as certain possibility.
The only reason people here are so comfortable with this man getting run over is because he's an asshole criminal. If that would've happened to him while he was pulling an internet prank, everyone would be horrified. Imagine that guy wearing a ridiculous costume and talking into the camera at the beginning of the video how he'll make that woman think she hit him with the car and what a great prank that'll be. Is he still getting what he deserves?
People give a shit about the man in the terrible accident because they made a judgement that he is a criminal and not worth it.
See, John Oliver has a point when talking about prisons.
I saw a video of a man getting run over. It didn't upset me but the reactions to it did.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'alan simpson, bernie madoff, paul krugman' to 'banned, redacted' - edited by jonny

*promote - the song of the moment

it's about Bernie Madoff apparently

Liberal Lies About National Health Care: Third in a Series (Commemorative Plates On Sale Now!)
Ann Coulter
Wednesday, September 02, 2009


(9) If you like Medicare, you'll love national health care, which will just extend Medicare's benefits to everyone.

Hey -- I have an idea: How about we make everyone in America a multimillionaire by pulling Bernie Madoff out of prison and asking him to invest all our money! Both Medicare and Bernie Madoff's investment portfolio are bankrupt because they operate on a similar financial model known as a "Ponzi scheme." These always seem to run fabulously well -- until the money runs out.

Not only is Medicare bankrupt, but it is extremely limited in whom and what it covers. If Medicare were a private insurer, it would be illegal in many states for failing to cover hearing aids, podiatry, acupuncture, chiropractic care, marriage counseling, aromatherapy and gender reassignment surgery.

Moreover, Medicare payments aren't enough to pay the true cost of those medical services it does cover. With Medicare undercutting payments to hospitals and doctors for patients 65 and older, what keeps the American medical system afloat are private individuals who are not covered by Medicare paying full freight (and then some). That's why you end up with a $10 aspirin on your hospital bill.

National health care will eliminate everything outside of Medicare, which is the only thing that allows Medicare to exist.

Obviously, therefore, it's preposterous for Democrats to say national health care will merely extend Medicare to the entire population. This would be like claiming you're designing an apartment building in which every apartment will be a penthouse. Everyone likes the penthouses, so why not have a building in which every apartment is a penthouse?

It doesn't work: What makes the penthouse the penthouse is all the other floors below. An "all-penthouse" building is a blueprint that could make sense only to someone who has never run a business and has zero common sense, i.e., a Democrat.

(10) National health care won't cover illegal aliens -- as the president has twice claimed in recent radio appearances.

Technically, what Obama said is that the bill isn't "designed" to give health insurance to illegal aliens. (That bill, the "Health Insurance for Illegal Aliens Act of 2009," was still being drafted by Ted Kennedy at the time of his death, may he rest in peace.)

But unless the various government bureaucracies dispensing health care are specifically required by law to ask about citizenship status, illegals will be covered. We can't even get employers and police to inquire about citizenship status, but liberals assure us that doctors will?

And by the way -- as with the abortion exclusion -- the Democrats expressly rejected amendments that would have required proof of residency status to receive national health care.

Still not convinced? Day after day, The New York Times has been neurotically asserting that national health care won't cover illegal aliens (without ever explaining how precisely it will exclude illegal aliens).

So far, just this week, these Kim Jong Il-style pronouncements have appeared in the Treason Times:

-- "Illegal immigrants will be covered. (Myth)" -- Katharine Q. Seelye, "Myth vs. Fact vs. Other," The New York Times, Sept. 2, 2009

-- "(Sen. Jim DeMint) fueled speculation that a health care overhaul would cover illegal immigrants, although specific language says it would not." -- Katharine Q. Seelye, "Fighting Health Care Overhaul, and Proud of It," The New York Times, Aug. 31, 2009

-- "'Page 50: All non-U.S. citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free health care services.' ... The falsehoods include (that italic statement)." -- Michael Mason, "Vetting Claims in a Memo," The New York Times, Aug. 30, 2009

-- "But that would not help illegal immigrants. Contrary to some reports, they would not be eligible for any new health coverage under any of the health overhaul plans circulating in Congress." -- Duff Wilson, "Race, Ethnicity and Care," The New York Times, Aug. 30, 2009

The last time the Times engaged in such frantic perseveration about a subject was when the paper was repeatedly insisting that Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong had a solid case against the Duke lacrosse players.

By August 2006, every single person in the United States, including the stripper, knew the stripper's claim of "gang rape" was a lie. That was when Duff Wilson -- quoted above -- co-wrote the Times' infamous cover story on the Duke case, titled: "Files From Duke Rape Case Give Details but No Answers." No answers!

(11) Obama has dropped his demand for the ironically titled "public option" (i.e., government-run health care), which taxpayers will not have an "option" to pay for or not.

Liberals never, ever drop a heinous idea; they just change the name. "Abortion" becomes "choice," "communist" becomes "progressive," "communist dictatorship" becomes "people's democratic republic" and "Nikita Khrushchev" becomes "Barack Obama."

It doesn't matter if liberals start calling national health care a "chocolate chip puppy" or "ice cream sunset" -- if the government is subsidizing it, then the government calls the shots. And the moment the government gets its hands on the controls, it will be establishing death panels, forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions and illegal aliens, rationing care and then demanding yet more government control when partial government control creates a mess.

Which happens to be exactly what liberals are doing right now.

Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

It is cyclical, but who times the cycles?

The poor don't do it. The poor did nothing wrong regarding this.

Enron robbed California blind, and nothing was really done about it.

Arthur Anderson, Bear Sterns (short sold), Bernie Madoff who could not have stolen all of that money by himself.

We are not seeing an aberration of the system.

We are witnessing the essence of the system.

If I ever have brain surgery I hope that while my surgeon is poking around in there he's thinking about brain surgery and not about how much money he invested with Bernie Madoff.

If the press did their job, they'd do some work to see how much of what Naomi Wolf is saying is plausible or reasonable, and then turn the same critical eye to Beck, and then present a verdict that isn't predetermined to be "they both have about the same credibility." In other words, they should try to make an objective determination about what's really happening, even if it's closer to what one of the political parties is saying than the other.

What Wolf did was look at a sequence of events that actually happened, and plotted the trajectory towards a really uncomfortable conclusion.

Essentially, she said "hey, look at the way Republicans are using fear to achieve their goals, and it's following the playbook dictators use!"

Obama wins, and now Glenn Beck comes on TV every night and accuses Obama of using Wolf's playbook for dictators.

What's a modern day reporter to do? Both the left and the right are calling each other fascists -- this must just be a simple partisan squabble, so we'll just ignore both of them, except to condemn them for their strident partisanship (of which they're equally guilty, regardless of where the facts stand).

This is a bit like Bernie Madoff saying "hey, my clients cheated me just as bad as I cheated them!" and having the press refuse to indicate in their reporting who might be telling the truth, and who might not be, because that would be "partisan".

Wolf was wrong about martial law, but I don't think it was an unreasonable thing to say "doesn't that look like where we're headed?"

Beck, some 8 weeks into Obama's presidency, is saying it's the end of capitalism and freedom, and the rise of fascism. That's just not reasonable.

The fact that some intellectuals on the left said it in the last years of Bush's presidency, doesn't mean that when entertainers on the right make the same accusation in the opening days of Obama's presidency, both have equal weight.

I think media matters is sorta right that the press shouldn't try to evoke fear, but I think more accurately, I think they need to be judicious and just make sure that what they're reporting is valid.

Saying "beware toys made in China from these manufacturers because the FDA has found that many of them contain lead paint" is justified, even if it evokes fear. Saying "Letting the Bush tax cuts expire will crash the economy and drive us into a Communist dictatorship" isn't.

"What Hitler started, Bernie Madoff finished."
-- Anonymous Madoff investor from Palm Beach, quoted in Vanity Fair.

With an impressive client list indeed.

Apparently, the lie is what enticed many of them.