Given the choice between skantily clad busty girl / firefox and bedroom-eyes bill gates / internet explorer, the ‘right’ choice (for a straight computer nerd) would be girl/firefox, right? I hate to admit it, but… if using IE is the price I have to pay for sleeping with circa-1980s Bill Gates… sorry, hot firefox chick.
Well, you know how I feel about capital punishment - I’m convinced that killing people is absolutely wrong, and should only be considered in the context of weighing one life against another.
Of course it sounds like a good idea - nobody likes those child-rapists, right? Of course they deserve to die! Rather then arguing that no one deserves death, I’m going to point something else out - not everyone defines ‘child’ and ‘rape’ the same way.
How young is a child? Below 18? Maybe 16? 14? 8? 4? Right off you’re going to have to pick an arbitrary number - what if you pick 15 as the magic number, and then some kid who’s 15-and-four-days gets raped? Is that somehow less worthy of death then the kid who’s 14-and-363-days?
And what’s rape? That should be obvious, but it isn’t - you know why ’statutory rape’ is considered rape? Not because there’s neccesarily any coercion involved - but because the ‘victim’ is unable to give legal consent to having sex. So does this mean that we can kill a 19-year-old who has safe. consentual sex with his 17-year-old boyfriend? At 17 he’s still a child, and that’s rape - punishable by death?
Extreme examples? Of course they are - but you know that they’re going to happen, and innocent kids are going to get killed. Our justice system is good, but it’s not perfect - and would you trust an imperfect system to sentance criminals to death? Because I sure wouldn’t. I would feel guilty as hell about it. I do actually feel pretty guilty that we still have the death penalty here in the US, and that people would actually try to expand the territory covered by that act of cold-blooded murder.
Mmmm. Well, that’s all the politics i’ve got energy for tonight.
I read this cnn article about sex offenders living near child car facilities, in homes with children, et cetera -
Sex offenders living at child care facilities, audit says
Am I missing something? Are all sex offenders potential child-rapists? Are they all even potential people-rapists? Let’s say you raped a woman, and you’ve served your time, and now you’re out of jail. Is it okay for you to live next to an elementry school? Let’s say you molested a little boy - is it okay for you to live next to an all-girls school? How about if you just flashed a bunch of people at a bus stop? What about consentual-yet-underage sex? Are we just assuming that a sex offender at any level is potentially a sex offender at every level? And - is that a neccesary assumption to make?
So I was reading this article -
Coughlin contends that the Christian man in America has become passive, straitjacketed by a church culture that insists he emulate a version of Christ who is mild to an extreme, almost “wimpy” in some eyes. This Jesus avoids confrontation, is overly patient and is devoted — to a fault — to the dictum “turn the other cheek.”
Coughlin can be blunt; in his book, he calls this version of Jesus the “Bearded Lady.”
“The fact is,” he told the gathering, “a meek and mild Jesus eventually is a bore. He doesn’t inspire us.” The same applies, he argued, to a meek and mild man. “Those men end up divorced,” Coughlin said. “Their wives find them boring. They have no — I call it the ‘jalapeno factor’ — in them. There’s no inner heat that causes them to actively, assertively go out and do what needs to be done as a man.”
… it’s weird, this sounds like more of a problem with our culture’s concept of gender stereotypes then a problem with how jesus is represented in modern church. Do we really need something like GodMen where “men can be fully men … when faith gets dangerous”? I guess I would kind of see it as a question of whether you adapt the religion to the culture, or the culture to the religion, where the former would result in a more accessible yet possible less faithful rendition, and the latter would be a lot more challenging but ultimately truer to the original. I don’t know.
… and I’m not even going to point out the obvious male chauvanism in the remarks about what women want from men. Oh wait I just did.