Two weeks’ linkage, ah, ah, ah
For two weeks’ worth of links, there aren’t very many. Then again, I do still have 173 unread items in Google Reader.
- glenscott.net » Restore an Eee PC 701 back to factory Xandros from a USB stick with no ASUS Support DVD – This proved quite handy last night in restoring ol' Tammy to defaults for Greg.
- The legend of the superprogrammer – "Caper Jones, in an unpublished 1977 study for IBM, found that the very best developers are much more productive than the worst programmer — when working on small projects. The best developer will complete a 1k line of code (LOC) effort 6 times faster than the lousiest. The productivity delta falls to 2x on a 64k LOC project. Beyond a few hundred thousand LOC both sorts of people perform equally well. Or equally poorly."
- Skepticblog » The Reasonableness of Weird Things – "Many people have quite good reasons for believing in the paranormal. […] In my experience, the top reasons people believe weird things are not only understandable, but identical to the reasons most skeptics believe things: they are persuaded by personal experiences (or by the experiences of a loved one); or, they are persuaded by the sources they have consulted."
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I get so sick of elitist, skeptic douchebags with their holier-than-thou lock on critical thinking that I — despite having the same desires to protect people against fraudulent untruths — won't put the label of "skeptic" on myself. It's a movement that has a rude, pushy face in far too many of the cases I've seen. I hope more folks take articles like this to heart.
- Think Progress » Racist New Hampshire State House Candidate Advises Tea Party To Be More Open With Its Racism – "For far too long white Americans have been told that diversity is something beneficial to their existence. Statistics prove that the opposite is true."
Um. Okay.
- Because Blacks are not American | Prometheus 6 – Too bad I didn't teach a "fuzzy" subject like history. Then I could have had the opportunity to really screw with people's heads.
- Buttersafe » The Essence of Being Human – Mmm, cat videos.
- 10 New High-Quality Fonts for Your Designs | Freebies – I always love things like this, even if — for the web — it means slicing and dicing text as images. To that end, if sites could consistently and easily push fonts out to users, would that be a good thing?
- Is It Time To Quit Your Day Job? – One of those nice "get off your butt and do your passion job" articles. 🙂
- High Test Coverage Ratio is a good thing, Anyway! – Patrick Smacchia [MVP C#] – CodeBetter.Com – Stuff you need to Code Better! – Patrick uses the broken window argument to conclude that 100% test coverage from the start will encourage developers to maintain 100% coverage in code as they refactor. I'm not sure I buy that for cases where rapidly-developed prototypes are refactored and developed into deployed applications.
- 70 Unique Examples Of 404 Error Pages For Your Inspiration – These are gorgeous and helpful. And inspiring.
- How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made – Don't know about you, but I can't get enough of Mustafa.
- Rules For Games: Do & Don’t #1 | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – "Don’t: leave diary entries by one person scattered over miles of corridors, buildings and countries. That’s not how a diary works."
…And more.
- The Dawn Chapel – Firefox has crashed – I like cookies. And cuteness.
- Siobhan – “they were going to strip search me … this feeling, this experience, is the hardest for me to reconcile and one of the times in my life I have felt the most powerless” | G20Inquiry.org – I've evidently been sleeping on some serious shit going on.
- Arab guilty of rape after consensual sex with Jew | World news | The Guardian – Leaving aside the crazy Israeli politics and the legal side — is deliberately lying about something to get sex with someone rape if you know the thing you're lying about would make the other person say "no"? As of this moment, I think so.
4 Comments
guyblade
I had previously heard of the Arab who was convicted of rape for (essentially) being an Arab and have to say that I tend to come down on the other side. If his name had been Stevie McCrapshispants (of the New Hampshire McCrapshispants) and he was hiding this fact due to the name being embarrassing, would it still be rape? The question in my mind is this: if he were not an Arab and instead was hiding his French or German or Russian heritage, would he still have been tried? None of these questions lead to happy places.
Gregory Weir
I’m on the fence about this one. It seems analogous to the question of whether fraud is equivalent to theft, although that comparison is oversimple and problematic itself.
An extreme example of lying-to-get-sex: suppose identical twins, Bob and Bill, so similar that you can’t tell them apart by sight or mannerism. Bob is married to Cathy. Bill poses as Bob to have sex with Cathy. Is this rape? It seems clear to me that it is.
On the other hand, what if you told a woman you were rich to get her into bed, when you really weren’t? That seems a bit more iffy. It’s certainly a sleazy, wrong thing to do, but I don’t think I’d call it rape.
The relevant issues in the Arab/Jew case seem to me to be: 1) He actively lied; it wasn’t a lie by omission, and 2) She would have objected strongly if she had known the truth. Presumably, he knew this, which is why he lied. A deliberate lie to cover up something that would make the person not have sex with you? I think that’s pretty much rape.
guyblade
My initial hearing of this issue was from the guardian coverage which goes into substantially more detail as to the events. Of course, it primarily presents the accused’s argument since the accuser has yet to make a public statement on the issue. In it, the accused alleged that the only thing he actively lied about was his single status. He alleges that he made no statements about his religion or ethnic background, but that they were likely incorrectly inferred due to his “Jewish” nickname and ability to speak Hebrew fluently.
Gregory Weir
If his account is true, I think it’s only slightly in his favor. He still lied in such a way that she would sleep with him. I’m not sure that lying about your marital status is any different than lying about anything else, even if it pains me as a polyamourist to say so.