Apparently I married a unicorn. She explicitly didn’t want a diamond but a sapphire and explicitly didn’t want me to spend a fortune on it. Got her ring from an online jeweler on sale. Paid less than $300 for it. During the first Trump admin. We had talked about what she wanted and I found something close after shopping around. Then I held onto it for six months planning when to ask.
In the US, age of consent varies by state. In most US states the age of consent to sex with someone who is not in a position of authority is 16. Often with a close in age exception. 18 gets used in US media so much because that’s what it is in CA and NY, and that’s where most media is made.
18 is also federal age of consent, but that only applies when an incident involves crossing state lines.
I mean yeah. That said, if the GOP seems to start shining that turd a bit later than this time next year, know that the plan is for Trump to learn the meaning of planned obsolescence.
You only asked about rape/SA, so it was the only topic I responded to. According to FBI stats, the 8-10% is actually pretty typical for many other crimes too, but falsely accusing someone of most other crimes aside from something like murder is going to have consequences that are either shorter term or less severe (reputational consequences of being falsely accused of beating someone up are smaller than being falsely accused of rape, for example). Also, rape/SA often has the accusation itself as the primary or occasionally only evidence against the accused, and sometimes that is enough especially in older cases where any physical evidence would be long gone.
inconvenienced
“Inconvenienced” to several months in jail, or 5 years in prison and five of probation and registered as a sex offender until they were exonerated, and several of the ones in the Innocence Project archives are worse than that.
The 2006 Duke Lacrosse kids were “inconvenienced”, and even that involved threats, harassment and vandalism for a case where every piece of evidence except her claims worked against her claims - she also finally admitted to making it up, in 2024.
false accusations are a tiny fraction of accusations
In the 8-10% range by most studies, with some outliers going as low as 2% or as high as 40%.
The distinction between rape and sex is consent. Whether a given sex act is consensual or not exists only in the minds of those involved in it (consent is a mental state, not something directly observable from outside), unless communicated and when communicated only the communication exists which is likely not in any fixed form.
How bad does the damage from the false accusation need to be?
One I’m fond of pointing to as evidence that they happen is Tracy West accusing her ex Louis Gonzales. He spent three months in jail while it was being investigated, and only got out because he happened to have a very heavily corroborated alibi for the day that left only a 6 minute window during which he would have had to travel a total of 2 miles, obtain a duffel bag full of forensic countermeasures, subdue and rape the victim, dispose of said duffel bag in a manner it would never be recovered and return. And that 6 minute window was not when she originally said it happened, until they allowed her to revise her statement which became much fuzzier about when it happened. Also there was evidence that she was researching the way she was tied up in the days leading up to her being tied up exactly that way. By all appearances this case was about a custody dispute over their kid, and despite the case being dropped because it was physically impossible for him to have done it she still got to use it against him because fucking family courts. He eventually got a finding of factual innocence from CA courts and had the entire thing expunged from his record - to be clear, this essentially requires proving beyond a reasonable doubt that you could not have committed the crime. When he was interviewed by an LA paper about the case, he’d developed an obsession with being as publicly visible with as much paper trail as possible at all time, just in case because of how lucky he was with his alibi from this case (if he’d eaten before he left to get the kid, his alibi wouldn’t exist and that alibi is the reason he only spent 3 months in jail).
How about Brian Banks? Kid with a real chance of going into professional football, Falsely accused, threatened with 41 years, plead to 5 years + 5 probation + registering as a sex offender on advice of his lawyer. The accuser sues the school and wins $1.5M. 9 years later, his accuser contacts him on Facebook and they speak. He secretly records the conversation, in which she admits to having lied but refuses to tell authorities that because she was afraid that they might make her pay back the money. The video gets released publicly and the Innocence Project gets involved. He goes on to briefly join the UFL and then NFL after not having meaningfully played for 11 years (time that would have been the prime of his career if not for the accusation).
Speaking of the Innocence Project, what’s your opinion of them? It tends to vary for left leaning folks - either they like it because a lot of the people exonerated are POC or they hate it because a significant majority of people exonerated by it were imprisoned for some flavor of sexual assault. Go look at their list of cases: https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/ According to the site when filtered for sex crimes 184 of the “more than 250” people were imprisoned wrongly for a sex crime. 124/184 of those exonerated by the Innocence Project that were imprisoned for a sex crime were misidentified by an eyewitness. For sex crimes, that eyewitness is very often the alleged victim.
They want him to make it to Jan 21, 2027, then he can keel over. That way Vance can still qualify for two full terms afterward.
SA is hard to get a conviction in.
Yeah. It turns out that something that usually has no witnesses beyond the accused and accuser, often has little or no evidence other than the accusation itself and the sole difference between it and an otherwise common and legal act exists solely in the mind of the accuser is difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
It lost it’s meaning before that.
It started as “we have confirmed you are who you say you are, public figure”, and that was it.
The some Twitter features were pegged to it.
Then it spread.
Then it also somehow became a “Twitter approves of this message” flag, as some people were stripped of their check for posting offensive things (probably most notoriously Milo).
Then Twitter staff started expediting the process in exchange for essentially bribes.
Then Elon buys Twitter.
Then it just became a subscription service, with enhanced features over non-check users.
Well, there’s the problem! It’s only half off for his protection - nobody likes hair in their cuye.
I just set the tip to zero and put “Will tip cash” in the delivery instructions on the rare occasions I do something like DoorDash.
Unless I order from a.local Chinese place that will deliver. I tip them generously, basically giving the older Chinese guy who usually runs the deliveries an amount akin to what all the fees from DoorDash would have been because at least then it’s the restaurant getting the money.
While the effect of not having as much random porn on steam is kinda nice, the underlying reasons for this are fucking horrifying because it’s further proof that some giant american companies (visa, paypal, mastercard) are the global morality police.
They have been for decades. You just aren’t going to see news stories anywhere major when what’s being banned by the morality police is something like loli or zoo content, but stuff no one wants to publicly defend are targeted first to set precedent to justify anything else they might want to ban later.
See the H.L. Mencken quote about defending scoundrels.
The more money someone makes, the few drug tests they take.
The more money someone makes, it’s also the less likely they’re working a job where people can be seriously harmed or killed by the direct, immediate effects of their behavior on the job. Jim from Sales being on smack is less likely to cause injury or death in the short term than forklift driver Klaus being on smack.
And, the sites end up eating battery.
Yeah, but they would have done that in 2005 too, if you were using them on a device with a battery.
Why I said usually. Most gay men and most straight women are the exceptions.
VBNMW was always “we want to give you a shitty candidate, you’ll vote for it and you’ll like it.”
I would assume they meant “of boobs”, but you present an interesting question of terminology. Unfortunately it begs the question, what exactly would we mean by “on boobs” in this context, so that we can question if “off boobs” is it’s opposite?
Also, boobs. The answer to boobs is usually yes.
The truck owners I know, myself included, use them all the time for towing and like the added utility having the bed as as secondary feature.
Then you put it beside a truck from 30 years ago that’s a quarter the overall size but has the same bed capacity and towing power along with much better visibility instead of not being able to see the child you’re about to run over. And then you understand what people mean when they say massive trucks - giant ridiculously unnecessary things that are all about being a status symbol and dodging regulations rather than practicality.
The difference being you weren’t desperate enough to take “any hole is a goal” as a motto worth following.